HP Reassigns Enterprise IT VP Donatelli Ahead of Earnings: Report

Hewlett-Packard's shifting Dave Donatelli to another part of the company is the latest executive move by CEO Meg Whitman as she tries to revive HP’s fortunes.

Dave Donatelli, who oversees Hewlett-Packard's business group that includes servers, storage, networking and other data center hardware, reportedly is being reassigned somewhere else within the company, the latest executive change made by CEO Meg Whitman.

Donatelli's reassignment Aug. 21 comes two months after Whitman removed Todd Bradley as head of HP's PC and printing unit and just hours before Whitman and other company executives announce the latest quarterly financial numbers.

News site AllThingsD, citing anonymous sources, said Donatelli's reassignment will be announced officially during the conference call with analysts and journalists regarding the quarterly earnings, and that his replacement will be revealed at the same time.

In addition to Donatelli's shift, HP also is reassigning its chief marketing officer, Marty Homlish, to another position within the company, AllThingsD reported. That announcement also will be made later in the day Aug. 21.

According to the news site's sources, Whitman, who is trying to navigate a multi-year turnaround of the massive tech company, is looking for "new thinking" from top executives in HP.

Donatelli, as executive vice president and general manager of HP's Enterprise Group, oversaw a $30 billion business that was created during a company-wide reorganization last year, and includes enterprise hardware and technical services. The business competes with such heavyweights as IBM, Dell and Cisco Systems in an area of the industry that is undergoing rapid change brought on by such trends as cloud computing, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), mobility and big data.

Donatelli's group in April launched the first of its Project Moonshot servers, which are small, highly energy-efficient systems designed for hyperscale and dense data centers.

In the second quarter, the business unit saw sales fall 10 percent from the same time last year, with all the business lines, except networking, losing revenues. Networking sales were up 1 percent, while x86-based server revenues fell 12 percent, high-end system revenues dropped 37 percent, storage fell 13 percent and technology services dropped 3 percent.

Donatelli came to HP four years ago from storage giant EMC, and like Bradley had been seen as a possible CEO candidate during the several times in HP's recent history when it was looking for a new chief executive.

Whitman is looking to turn HP around after several years of poor financial numbers, due in part to the sharp decline in PC sales worldwide and the instability in the CEO office that saw three chief executives in less than a two-year time span. Whitman has resisted calls for her to break up the company, saying HP is stronger because of its broad product offerings, and is looking to make the company a larger player in such growth areas as enterprise IT technology and mobile devices, including tablets and smartphones.

In October 2012, Whitman laid out a turnaround road map that will span four to five years, and said that plans being put in place wouldn't begin to change the company's faltering bottom line until 2014. Included in the strategy were more than 29,000 job cuts that will help the company realize $3.5 billion in cost savings, she said.

According to reports, financial analysts are expecting Whitman Aug. 21 to announced revenues of $27.3 billion for the most recent fiscal quarter, which would be about $2 billion less than during the same period in 2012.