Hewlett-Packard continued to realign its top-drawer corporate leadership Oct. 6 when it announced that 3PAR President and CEO David Scott is returning to take charge of its StorageWorks division.
Only a week earlier, the huge IT company hired former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker as its new CEO, succeeding Mark Hurd.
Because he served as sole CEO of SAP for only seven months and wasn’t very successful, Apotheker has drawn insults from such well-known corporate leaders as Oracle’s Larry Ellison and former GE chief Jack Welch.
Ellison, of course, has his own agenda, being a sworn enemy of SAP, so he’s going to yelp at anything connected with that company. Welch, who retired long ago from daily business, is a major-league author and opinionist.
You won’t see Ellison and Welch — nor too many other folks — say those things about Scott, who led 3PAR to fair to good success in a tough storage market and piloted the company to one of the most successful exits ever in a $2.35 billion sale to HP.
Scott, whose title will be senior vice president and general manager for HP StorageWorks, will report to Dave Donatelli, executive vice president of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. Donatelli came from storage giant EMC in January 2009 and was a chief engineer of the 3PAR acquisition. He is reshaping the HP storage franchise.
Scott has put in 27 years in the enterprise storage, software and server market. Prior to 3PAR, Scott was general manager of the XP enterprise storage business for HP StorageWorks. Before that he held various marketing, business strategy, sales and systems engineering positions across HP’s enterprise server, storage and software business units.
Congratulations, Mr. Scott. You’ve had quite an interesting couple of weeks.