Hewlett-Packard said Thursday that Shane Robison, executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer and an 11-year HP veteran, will retire from the company at the start of its fiscal year on Nov. 1.
Robison came to HP in its 2001 acquisition of Compaq, where he was CTO and head of strategy. In addition to being a member of HP's Executive Council, Robison has led the company's R&D investments and mergers and acquisitions, including Mercury, Opsware, EDS and 3Com.
As head of HP's Office of Strategy and Technology division (OS&T), Robison has also led the company's HP Cloud Services, Vertica and Business Solutions incubation initiatives.
In recent months, Robison has spoken out in defense of HP's acquisitions of Palm and Autonomy. Last month at the InformationWeek 500 conference, Robison said Autonomy is a strategic asset for HP because of its ability to manage unstructured data within organizations.
"When you can do things like extract meaning out of e-mails, determine difference in images, determine tone and mood in voice, the capabilities are unlimited," Robison said at the event.
Robison also insisted that despite HP's decision to kill off the TouchPad, the WebOS development platform could be an important asset for enterprise customers.
"WebOS, the OS itself, is an incredibly efficient Web-oriented operating system. But sitting on top of WebOS is even more important, and that's the development environment called Enyo, for those of you who know WebOS. It is the leading Web app development environment today," Robison said at the event.
HP in September moved the WebOS software engineering, developer relations and software product marketing teams outside of its Personal Systems Group and into OS&T.
HP won't be replacing Robison: Instead, it will retire the position of chief strategy and technology officer in order "to drive strategy, research and development closer to the company’s businesses," the company said in a statement.
