The Hindu : Business : Curtains for Carly may mean centre stage for Vyomesh

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 11, 2005

Business

Business

Curtains for Carly may mean centre stage for Vyomesh

By Anand Parthasarathy

The outgoing Chief Executive Officer of HP, Carly Fiorina, and the new head of Imaging and Personal Systems group, Vyomesh Joshi.

MUMBAI, FEB. 10. The exit on Wednesday, of `computer queen' Carleton ("Carly'') Fiorina, from leadership of Information Technology major Hewlett Packard had a tinge of unintended irony here in India: Even as guests assembled at Mumbai's Taj Land's End hotel to witness Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Kamal Nath preside over the declaration of Nasscom's (National Association of Software and Service Companies) Global Leadership Awards for 2005, Ms. Fiorina, one of the five leaders being honoured, was leaving the company after the HP board meeting in Chicago, expressed unhappiness at her continuance.

While HP India's Managing Director, Balu Doraiswamy, accepted the award on her behalf, Ms. Fiorina's gracious video-taped acceptance speech was beamed. Nasscom cited her "well defined organisational goals and far reaching vision,' but back home it was not apparently enough — and the woman ranked the world's 10th most power female in a recent Forbes listing — had to go just six years after she came to HP from telecom leader Lucent/AT&T, with a mandate to modernise and show profit.

"Carly's comeuppance'' as a less kindly publication characterizes her exit, may mark the reassertion of the legendary "HP Way'' — a more benign, less crassly commercial style of doing business, that co-founders Bill Hewlett and David Packard put in place 65 years ago. It may also signal a return to the company's strength and roots in printers and imaging, something that seemed to get slightly de-emphasised, as the Carly years saw an attempt to widen the scope to more high end enterprise systems — even bizarrely to selling Apple's iPods. In the harsh business climate of today, there are no marks for good intentions, only results; and Ms. Fiorina's strategy of acquiring PC maker Compaq is now being panned in comfortable hindsight by her many nay sayers.

Not one of the more outgoing CEOs to visit India, Ms. Fiorina restricted her contact with the Bangalore media to a brief statement, and barely took any questions, on her first and only visit two years ago. Informally, HP executives in recent weeks were hoping she would come later this year, to mark the successful completion of HP's e-inclusion community project at Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh — one of her many digital divide initiatives.

Indian hand on the printer

One of the last major decisions Ms. Fiorina took in recent weeks was to bring the company's imaging and personal systems — including printers, digital cameras, handhelds, PCs — under one head: Executive Vice President, Vyomesh Joshi.

The Ahmedabad-born 50 year old Mr. Joshi, a master's in electrical engineering from Ohio State University, is a HP veteran from 1980, who began as a researcher for pen plotters and went on to lead innovation in large format printing and the new-age multi function products.

By now providing effective guidance to the business HP was best known for, he may in fact be, central to any restructuring and course correction that the company will now attempt under a new and as yet unnamed CEO. That makes Mr. Vyomesh one of the senior most Indian technocrats in the global computer business and possibly the vanguard of a new, revised, "HP Way.''

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