HP to split up

Interesting changes in the corporate M&A; or disaggregation arena. With M&A;, you are looking to build market strength by acquiring valuable IP, assets, brands, names, teams, capabilities, trade secrets, special sauces, etc. You do that to make your group stronger and more capable of handling the challenges ahead. With a disaggregation, you slice off disparate portions of the business, and set them free to pursue their own path. This is what was rumored a few weeks ago with EMC, a possible split of the federated businesses. It could make sense if the businesses have no appreciable overlap, and there is more value in separate entities than a federation. That is, if one or more of the entities is effectively prevented by internal politics from pursuing an better strategy or set of tactics, because it would rile up its federated partners. So the latest rumor (and it may be more than a rumor at this stage) is that HP is looking to split. HP makes a little more than 20% of its revenue from printing, and 30% of its revenue from its personal systems. The rest of the business is in the enterprise systems, software, services. This is a huge potential split. I’d guess that they realized in their discussions with EMC, that they’d have to split the organization to better focus upon the enterprise. Which to a degree explains why HP didn’t jump at the chance (though its also quite possible that EMC was asking too high a price). Further, I’d bet that a number of others have been shopping themselves around. But an HP that isn’t focused won’t likely do anyone any good. So this is interesting to say the least, but it raises questions on a number of things. HP has switching, servers, storage, services, etc. on the enterprise side. I am assuming all would remain. Would this disaggregated company seek to remain independent, or sell itself to someone else (say a Quanta or someone like that)? Would the PC and printing unit do something like that? We live in interesting times.