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Now be honest – would you take divorce advice from Meg Whitman?

CEO urges anyone pondering splits or M&As to 'call us, we're good at this'

HPE Discover The corporate divorce at HP went so smoothly that the Enterprise wing now plans to spin up a services practice to offer advice to other organizations going through similar upheaval.

HP split operationally on 1 August when it performed a switch-over of systems for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and now sister company HP Inc, but in the months prior a mammoth IT task was undertaken.

This involved the allocation of 2800 applications and 75,000 application interfaces, the networks, the global spread of six bit barns, and migrating 400k mail boxes across 170 countries.

Meg Whitman, CEO at HPE, told an audience at Discover that the internal IT teams built out "five times more infrastructure in a six-week period" than the company would typically do in several years.

The split went without a major hitch, a bunch of channel partners told as much all those months ago, and we searched high and low for evidence of issues to no avail.

The smoothness of the transition even shocked HP, which had put in the ground work to ease the movement, but warned that it expected things to get bumpy.

Whitman, who is also chairman at HP Inc, described the outcome of the "complex process" as "amazing." She said the level of work was at a "scale" that "most companies would never attempt."

"We got really good at this kind of work," she boasted, "and so actually what we've decided to do is create a new service practice where we are using everything we learned in separating Hewlett Packard and putting that knowledge to work for you."

In a pitch for business, the exec urged customers "thinking about a merger, acquisition, or divestiture" to "call us to help you with this IT separation," as no rival had pulled off a feat like this in the timescale.

We'll ask HP for more details about the services practice, but sadly Mrs Whitman had a nasty cold and so presented for a relatively brief period – leaving the floor open for her generals. We weren't able to catch her backstage. ®

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