Boise HP exec announces retirement as company gears up for reorganization

When Hewlett-Packard said on Wednesday it would reorganize its already profitable printing services business this summer, speculation ran high that a wave of job cuts was in the offing.

Alyson Griffin, a spokesperson from the Palo Alto- based company, said however that Boise’s 3,400 HP employees have nothing to fear.

“It’s not a layoff exercise; it’s not a negative response to something bad that happened. It was literally an evolution of our transformation [to a service orientation],” she said.

Just two days later, though, it became public that Nor Rae Spohn, Boise-based senior vice president of the company’s LaserJet Printing Business, would be retiring, effective Nov. 1.

The reorganization, which was announced in an internal memo from Imaging and Printing Group Vice President Vyomesh Joshi, said the company would merge its five printing groups into three, effective August 1.

The new groups will consolidate consumer services and hardware into one group and enterprise services and hardware into another, while focusing on small businesses, large corporations and graphics (billboards, signs and professional photography).

Brandy Baxter, an HP printer division press relations officer, denied that Spohn’s departure was linked to the reorganization, though confirmed that news of her planned retirement was released internally on the same day.

“It just ended up being good timing,” she said.

Spohn, who turned 50 this year, had been with the company since 1980 when she joined as an R&D engineer in the disc drive division. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2006, served as a science and technology advisor to the governor and sits on the boards of the Idaho Science, Mathematics and Technology Coalition and the Treasure Valley Mathematics & Science Center.

Baxter said Spohn – who company representatives say is on vacation and unavailable for comment – will stay on until her division is merged with HP’s enterprise services.

“It’s nothing immediate and she’ll be working on transitional items,” she said.

While underscoring that no layoffs have been announced, Griffin said workforce rebalancing will occur throughout the printer division, but couldn’t say precisely how the Boise campus would be impacted.

The reorganization comes on the heels of HP’s May announcement that it intends to acquire Electronic Data Systems, a Texas-based IT and business services firm, for $13.9 billion. Company representatives said the merger will strengthen HP’s IT-outsourcing services, business process outsourcing and technology services.

HP representatives say the company is healthy, announcing on Friday that it plans to add 1,300 jobs by 2012 at a new customer support center in New Mexico. The printer division is consistently among the company’s most profitable, making profits of $2.38 billion on revenue of $14.9 billion in the first six months of the current fiscal year.

For more info, see these links:

(New York Times article on reorganization)

(Spohn corporate bio)

(Electronic Data Systems)

(AP story on job additions in New Mexico)