Palm Names COO President of Solutions Group

Palm Inc. on Thursday officially named a president for its Solutions Group, the latest step in separating the hardware division into a company separate from the software division.

The new president is Todd Bradley, formerly the executive vice president of global operations at Gateway Inc. He had been acting as chief operating officer at Palm and will retain that role as well.

Bradley joined Palm in June 2001. For months he has been considered the obvious heir to the throne as he largely has been running the company since Carl Yankowski left as CEO of Palm last fall.

Eric Benhamou will remain Palms chief executive officer and chairman of the board.

“Were building the management bench strength we need to support the eventual external separation of our two Palm businesses,” Benhamou said in a statement. Palm officials did not give additional details about the split, which the company announced last July.

The Solutions Group sells Palm handheld computers, peripherals such as keyboards and expansion cards, and enterprise e-mail software.

Palm began splitting its hardware and operating systems divisions late last year in an effort to boost licensing sales of the OS to other hardware manufacturers. In February, the software group took the name PalmSource Inc. PalmSource is headed up by David Nagel, formerly an executive at AT&T Corp. and Apple Computer Corp. Nagel joined the company late last summer.