Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

HP Hires, or Rather Re-Hires, New Sales Head of Enterprise Services

Hewlett-Packard has hired a new global head of sales for Enterprise Services. The company will today name Larry Stack, a managing director and Global Sales lead for Health and Public Service at Accenture, to the position, sources tell AllThingsD.

Stack’s resignation was announced to employees in a company memo to Accenture employees yesterday. At HP, technically, Stack qualifies as a re-hire. Though he spent a little more than two years at Accenture, before that, according to his LinkedIn profile, he was a VP from 2002 to 2010 at EDS, the IT services firm that HP acquired in 2008, and on which it took a massive write-down last year.

Stack’s new title at HP will be senior vice president of Global Sales for Enterprise Services, the division that’s primarily made up of the former EDS. He will report to Mike Nefkens, executive vice president of that business unit.

Sources also confirm to AllThingsD that John Maguire, the prior sales lead for the Enterprise Services unit at HP, has left the company will be leaving the company after March 1.

Stack also served as a senior vice president at the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu, where he ran North American Communications and Government Operations at Fujitsu Consulting. He also worked for the United Nations, running field operations in Angola, and as a negotiator in Bosnia. He did a five-year stint from 1988 to 1993 working in communications at the White House Situation Room.

Enterprise sales has of late been HP’s most troubled unit. Last August, HP took an $8 billion impairment charge to write off the lost value in the company for which it paid nearly $14 billion in 2008. The same day, CEO Meg Whitman announced that she had fired the unit’s head, John Visentin, who had been named to run it by prior CEO Léo Apotheker.

The day after the write-down was announced it emerged that HP’s services unit had been considered responsible for a very embarrassing problem at Australia’s Commonwealth Bank that was seen as emblematic of the troubles the unit has been seeking to fix.

(Update: I revised the headline to reflect the fact that Stack is the Global Head of Sales at Enterprise Services. Not the Global Head of Enterprise services. Sorry about that.)

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald