Bill Veghte, the executive who since October 2014 has been leading Hewlett-Packard’s separation strategies as it prepares to break into two, will leave the company ahead of the split.
HP officials on June 30 announced that Veghte, who has been with the company for five years and earlier this year was tapped to manage the vendor’s Enterprise Group, will leave later this summer to “pursue a new opportunity.” They did not elaborate on what Veghte will be doing.
He will be replaced by Antonio Neri, a 20-year HP veteran who has been running the day-to-day operations of the Enterprise Group and will become executive vice president and general manager.
Veghte’s departure comes as HP gears up to split into two new companies in a move announced more than eight months ago after several years of CEO Meg Whitman saying the vendor would remain as one despite pressure from some shareholders and analysts. One company—Hewlett-Packard Enterprise—will sell corporate IT solutions and services, including servers, networking gear, storage appliances, cloud solutions and enterprise software. HP Inc. will focus on PCs and printers.
Veghte, who came to HP from Microsoft, has led the group responsible for putting the separation preparations in place. The company will begin splitting in two Aug. 1, with the complete breakup scheduled to be completed by Nov. 1. Chris Hsu, who will assume the role of COO for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise after the breakup, will continue to work on the separation efforts.
In the five years with HP, Veghte has served as chief strategy officer, executive vice president of HP Software and COO.
He is the second high-profile executive to leave HP in recent weeks. Oracle officials announced in June that they had hired David Donatelli—who spent more than five years at HP after 22 years with storage giant EMC—to be the company’s executive vice president for converged infrastructure, essentially overseeing Oracle’s hardware efforts.
