As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014. The company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the early retirement plan. Workforce reduction plans will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultation with works councils and employee representatives, as appropriate.

The survey, conducted last month, is yet another confirmation that no company comes close to matching the iPad in the enterprise. Indeed, the iPad wannabes are barely on the radar. While 84% of the companies that plan to buy a tablet in the next quarter said they will go with Apple's iPad, up from 77% in November, just 8% said they will buy one from the No. 2 brand, Samsung, compared to 10% in the previous survey.

But Samsung, a highly diversified company, can better withstand a poor showing in the tablet market than can Hewlett-Packard and Dell. "Those companies need to win a toehold in tablets as PCs become less important, <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/4-ways-consumerization-threatens-dell-and-hp-187240">and they're not doing it</a>," [Changewave research director Paul] Carton says. "We're very bearish on them."

HP sees the two business groups — IPG sells printers both to consumers and businesses, and PSG sells PCs to consumers and businesses — as making more operational sense combined than apart, the source said. The plan is to have their line of business more readily integrated so they can approach customers together and with unified product offerings.

IPG was once the financial engine seen as keeping the rest of HP flush. It sells more printers than anyone else in the world, but makes most of its money selling ink cartridges and other supplies that tend to make higher profit margins than the printers themselves.
However, the IPG unit has seen its business decline in recent years. In its most recent quarter, HP reported that sales fell by 7%, to $6.3bn, while the unit’s earnings from operations fell by 32%.

Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services… did not say how much the computing services would cost, but said “we are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents.’” Amazon recently cut its prices, and its lowest cost computing is 2 cents per hour, though with extra features it can cost more. While Amazon tends largely to have a self-service model, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud will also offer more personalized sales and service, Mr. Singh said.

H.P. also plans to offer a number of tools for developers to use popular online software languages, like Ruby, Java, and PHP, as well as ways for customers to provision and manage their workloads remotely. The service will also include an online store where people can offer or rent software for use in the Hewlett-Packard public cloud.