HP To Reorganize Printer Division

The company is eliminating its supplies and Web services business units.

Although it is cutting the number of divisions, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company said there are not layoffs associated with the reorganization, said HP spokesperson Allyson Griffin.

"We don't have layoffs associated with this. Some early reports intimated that we did, but we don't. We're rebalancing our organization. So there's redundancy when you go from five to three, but we're looking to shift our resources to key growth areas," Griffin said.

"This is all part of transformation that we did almost two years ago in moving to print 2.0, moving from a printer company to a printing company," she said.

"This realignment is just to put hardware, services, solutions and supplies together in one spot. It's more streamlining after we learned what needs to be done in the last year and a half, and pushing these things together to make it more effective for our customers," she said. "We used to have supplies broken out as its own business unit, and part of yesterday's internal announcement is that the supplies are being embedded in the appropriate business unit."

Channel partners should not be affected by the changes at HP, Griffin said.

Employees learned of the reorganization in an internal memo and by Webcast on Wednesday.

Michael Hoffmann, formerly senior vice president of the supplies business, will be senior vice president of the graphics solutions business group, focused on large format and professional printing organizations.

The inkjet and Web solutions business, which incorporates retail and the low-end of SMB, will be led by SVP Steve Nigro, former SVP of the graphics solutions group.

David Murphy will be senior vice president of the laser jet and enterprise solutions business.

The changes take effect Aug. 1.