Jason Stamper's Blog: March 2005 Archives

HP's New CEO: Questionable Qualifications?
March 31, 2005

When HP announced it has finally found a new CEO in the shape of former NCR CEO Mark Hurd, a few eyebrows were raised, and rightly so. While Hurd has 25 years of technology industry experience, all of those 25 years have been spent at one vendor - NCR. Does the fact that NCR performed well during his two-year tenure as CEO there make up for the fact that NCR is the only company he has ever worked for? We shall have to wait and see.

Hurd started at NCR as a field salesman straight out of college, where he won a BA in business administration, and he subsequently held various management, operations, and sales and marketing roles. HP was keen to emphasize that his career at NCR culminated in a two year tenure as CEO, and that in fiscal 2004, NCR generated revenue of $6bn, up 7% from a year earlier, and net income rose nearly fivefold to $290m.

Fair enough - Hurd can clearly drive efficiency and get a company to perform. But will a 25-year career at a so-called 'Relationship Technology' vendor, and just two years' experience as a CEO, be a good match for a company that does everything from digital cameras to supercomputers? What about outsourcing - HP's outsourcing deal with Procter & Gamble alone is probably larger and more complex than the whole of NCR's outsourcing business put together.

It will also be fascinating to watch whether he has any more luck integrating the acquired Compaq business into HP than his predecessor Carly Fiorina. Remember that back in October Fiorina admitted at a conference in Taiwan that, "Compaq, while it was a huge merger, was a tactic, not a strategy. The challenge now is to leverage what we have built."

Since HP bought Compaq in 2002, it seems HP's board may have decided that the integration needed a new figurehead - the Compaq debacle is considered one of the key reasons behind Fiorina parting company with HP. So will Hurd do any better? Again, we shall have to wait and see, but NCR has not exactly made a lot of acquisitions of its own, particularly while Hurd was CEO. In the last two years it made only tiny acquisitions: Kinetics (for $26m - hardly on the scale of HP's Compaq merger); Innovasys; Copient and Bantel. They were such small acquisitions that integrating them was presumably not a terribly tough job. Compaq, on the other hand...

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Posted by on 06:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (3819)

Asking Jeeves About Wife's Affair
March 21, 2005

I just Asked Jeeves the question: "Has Ask Jeeves Been Sold?", and bizarrely, the online butler did not come back with a definitive 'yes' or 'no'. I asked because hours earlier it was announced that the company has indeed been sold, for around $1.85bn, to an investment-holding-company-type-thing called IAC/InterActiveCorp.

I don't mind Ask Jeeves, but I do find that it's only really valuable if you are asking a pretty straightforward question, like "How high is Everest?" (29,035 metres, apparently), or "How deep is the Pacific?" (11,033 metres at its deepest).

Ask anything a bit more tricky, like "My wife recently started having a secret affair with a librarian - which I only discovered after hiring a rather expensive private detective because I'd noticed my wife Kathryn (sorry, I forgot to give you her name earlier; it's Kathryn with a 'y' and a 'k', but no 'e') started to take four or five hours to choose a library book, and that's in the middle of the night, too, not during library opening hours - and I just wondered whether it would be best to confront her with the truth, or just buy my books from Amazon instead of having to go into the library and ponder whether Kathryn is sleeping with the man in the corduroy trousers, or even the woman in the mauve twinset (I mean really, who wears mauve these days?)", and the response is far less impressive.

When I put that question to Ask Jeeves, one of its top suggested links was to a short story by Hanif Kureishi, called Strangers When We Meet. I haven't read it myself, but Ask Jeeves seemed to think it would help because it is about some other people who have affairs. As you see, Jeeves still hasn't answered my question, and anyway, suggesting some reading material is hardly very considerate when he knows perfectly well that libraries are no longer on my list of favourite places.

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Posted by on 08:02 AM

Is Oracle in danger of over-extending itself?
March 10, 2005

No sooner has Oracle completed the PeopleSoft acquisition than it is off putting in a cash bid for Retek.  Come on Larry, don't you think you should concentrate on doing at least a little bit of PeopleSoft integration before you go out shopping again?

SAP originally tabled its $496m offer for Minneapolis-based Retek at the end of February. Oracle, fresh from its PeopleSoft victory, officially launched a rival $9 cash per share bid - which is 50 cents more than SAP. The total value of Oracle's deal would be approximately $515m.

Retek specializes in applications for retailers. Oracle says that this is an under-penetrated market, that Oracle is a better home for Retek than SAP - both technologically and financially - and that SAP only got to make an offer because Oracle was distracted.

"We decided that we were going to make a bid, partially to defend our number one position in North American applications market," Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO said on a conference call. "We were a bit distracted with the PeopleSoft acquisition process when SAP decided to make their bid," Ellison said. The companies had been in talks since September, he said. "It’s been our intention for some time to acquire Retek, it was just a matter of timing."

Well yeah, but that's my point: the timing really isn't great, even now. The history books are littered with failed technology acquisitions, and perhaps Oracle needs to concentrate on the PeopleSoft integration if it is to get it right.

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Posted by on 09:41 AM

Schwartz for (HP) President
March 02, 2005

Since HP CEO Carly Fiorina quit last month, there's been the usual Some-Bigwig-CEO-Position-Is-Now-Available speculation as to who might take the reins. In a previous blog I mulled the idea that former HP president and Compaq CEO Michael Capellas might take the post once he's sold MCI to Qwest or Verizon.

Other names that have been mooted for the HP CEO post include Ed Zander at Motorola (a genius, but he probably still has unfinished business there) and Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, another female leader after Fiorina, but possibly overly biased towards HP's printing business?

My suggestion? How about Sun's president and COO, Jonathan Schwartz? He may be waiting for McNealy to step aside from the CEO position, but that could be a long wait. Besides, Sun will always be McNealy's baby.

Schwartz may have been rather critical of HP of late, but then he probably has some good ideas for change, too. He knows big systems vendors, is a sprightly 38 years old, and is a well-known and dynamic figure within the industry. The only pre-requisite for him getting the HP CEO position, in my mind, is that he cuts off his ponytail. It may be a bit hip at Sun, but the HP elders are unlikely to be amused.

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Posted by on 04:28 AM