Another Accolade For Mark Hurd

It's good to be the Hurd. Hewlett-Packard boss Mark Hurd was named CEO of the Year Sunday by the San Francisco Chronicle in its annual Chron 200 report on the top public companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, adding to his growing collection of trophies and accolades since taking over the helm at HP in March 2005.

Hurd's and HP's string of success comes as no surprise to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant's channel partners and is reflected by big wins in Everything Channel's own Channel Champions awards and Channel Best Seller listings. That commitment to the channel has paid off for HP, which under Hurd has seen its stock price double and its revenue eclipse the $100 billion mark for the first time in 2007.

HP's overall revenue for 2007 was $104 billion, vaulting Hurd's team past IBM and making Hewlett-Packard the largest computing company in the world. In 2006, HP passed Dell as the top PC maker on the globe, vindicating Hurd's decision not to spin off his company's PC business as IBM had done with its computer unit.

Hurd took the reins from interim CEO Robert Wayman following Carly Fiorina's dismissal by HP's board of directors. His stewardship has been largely smooth from a PR perspective, though he did begin his tenure by laying off 15,000 employees in his first four months and later was forced to deal with the "pretexting" scandal involving then-chairwoman Patricia Dunn.

HP ranked second on the Chronicle 200 list of top public companies by sales revenue, trailing only Chevron which pulled in $221 billion for fiscal 2007. Other top high-tech companies on the list included Intel (6th overall, $38.3 billion in sales), Cisco (7th, $37.7 billion), Apple (8th, $26.5 billion), Oracle (9th, $21.0 billion), Google (10th, $16.6 billion), Sun Microsystems (12th, $13.9 billion), Seagate Technology (14th, $12.3 billion), Ebay (18th, $7.7 billion), Synnex (19th, $7.2 billion) and Yahoo (20th, $6.9 billion).