The $130 billion technology firm Hewlett Packard?s plans to cut 27,000 jobs globally in two years, and how that will impact India?one of its larger operations?has been a big question for a while. Neelam Dhawan, HP India?s managing director, in a conversation with Shreya Roy attempts to answer just that, at the annual HP Discover event in Las Vegas. Dhawan also gives a complete run-down on HP?s India business, the slow government decision-making in projects like India Post and UIDAI, and why this country matters for a host of cloud and storage products.
Meg Whitman, HP?s global CEO, has announced a major overhaul in the company?s operations since taking over in September last year. The company also plans to cut 27,000 jobs. What is the brief for India?
When our CEO came into the organisation last year, she met a lot of our customers, and the feedback that she got was that it is very complex to deal with HP. The complexity also comes with the breadth of our product portfolio. We want to make it simpler for our customers to work with us. That?s what we are trying to do. And that is true for India as it is for any other country. Right now, we are looking into how we can best align ourselves to the CEO?s strategy.
Are you looking at cutting jobs in India?
We are streamlining processes here and seeing what would the impact of this be. If this leads to job reductions, it would happen over time. I can?t say that we will head for straight-out job cuts. The first thing to do is examine what the front looks like to the customers. We are not reducing the number of people talking to the customers.
When you say ?over time?, how many quarters are you looking at?
The global announcement was to cut 27,000 people by 2014. We are 350,000 people, hence 27,000 is less than 10% of the work force. That?s how it is being planned out. But we are not going to rush into anything. There are many new products that are coming in, and we need to take these to the customer. It will work out in a phased manner. But the most important focus is to try simplifying the company.
From a business perspective, what is working for HP in India?
Banking and finance is the largest vertical for us. That is where we have a lot of products and services to offer. Those are seeing fairly stable growth. A lot of manufacturing companies are buying right now, and there we are seeing big growth. In the public sector, decisions are taking longer than they used to across all government organisations.
Have you witnessed a de-growth in government business resulting from slow decision-making?
Absolutely. When you look at public sector buying, major decisions haven?t happened at all. India Post, in which we are one of the bidders, is an example of that. Take UIDAI, too. That is also taking a long time. It was expected to have concluded in 2010-11, but it?s still going on.
The company has launched several major innovations in the cloud and storage space. What does this mean for the Indian market?
The Indian market is a very server-oriented market. ?StoreOnce Deduplication?, our new storage solution, is probably the most important of all for us. The data protection products also have a large market.
HP has a large innovation base in India. What is the contribution of your Indian R&D team in these products?
The cloud printing devices, which are basically mobile printing devices that let you print any time, anywhere, have been done mostly out of India. Again, HP Labs, which works on products that could be released 5-8 years later, is very active here. One of the projects we are working on in India is how do you interact with the internet without knowing any language. We are looking at several India-specific innovations. The third is our server, storage and software R&D unit based in Bangalore, which is also contributing in a big way.