"I think somebody at NCR is interesting, because of the diverse operational experience," Gillett said. "But note that there is no consumer stuff and note that the scale is completely different."
"That said, they were never going to find someone who was going to meet all the requirements," he added. "You're not going to find someone with all the bits. So you look for the best available mix."
The ideal candidate would have had experience running a company HP's size with a diverse product line serving both business and consumer customers.
Despite HP's stated strategy of keeping its units integrated, IDC's Kay said that the company could still revisit whether to spin off its PC business.
Way ahead
Before running all of NCR, Hurd used to head up the company's Teradata division, which sells software for building large data warehouses for analysing company information. NCR's Teradata unit has performed better than all the major competitors in the overall database market, growing at nearly 20 percent from 2003 to last year, according to IDC.
One NCR analyst said big changes are in store for HP, as Hurd is likely to take the same approach he had while at NCR.
"Some people say all he did was cut costs, but that's not true," said Jeff Embersits, an analyst at Shareholder Value Management. "He did a good job of restructuring the business — changing senior managers to get more competent people to work at NCR — and corrected their strategy."
After being named chief executive at NCR, Hurd began to institute changes almost immediately, Embersits said.
"With NCR, you had a company that ran poorly for three or five years, but within nine months, you had a sense of what Mark could do," Embersits said. "He has a broad skill set, and he'll go into HP and correct the strategy, product, management and costs — and probably in that order."
Gartner Group believes that Hurd will bring better accountability to HP. "There will be a return to proper, semi-independent lines of business that can be held accountable for the value they bring to the business," said Butler. "So we think the current structure of the company will be modified to better reflect the diverse business that HP is."
Eamonn Kennedy, research director at Ovum, said the broader question is what Hurd will turn HP into five or ten years from now. "Today the company is a consumer business, an enterprise business, a printer and ink business, a hardware manufacturer, and an outsourcing business. I'm not sure it can continue to be all of those things."
CNET News.com's Dawn Kawamoto and ZDNet UK's Matt Loney contributed to this report.
