A bit of a mystery?
Still, not everyone is sold on Hurd as a leader for the technology market.
"NCR has fallen so far off the radar. They have essentially been level, at best, for over a decade [in the general-purpose server market]", says Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata. HP instead should have tried to recruit one of the many lifers out of IBM, Eunice says.
Hurd is known as an operational cost cutter, but he doesn't have a huge record for growing market share, Eunice says.
Added Chris Foster, an analyst at Technology Business Research: "He's definitely a bit of a mystery. The pick was definitely out of left field."
Hurd will face tough choices right away, says Gartner's Martin Reynolds. HP has suffered under the burden of high overhead and an inability to derive much profit from a hardware business that reaps billions annually in revenue. Although HP went through massive layoffs following the acquisition of Compaq, more may have to occur, Reynolds says.
"He looks like an operations guy. He's got a cutting record. HP has this huge hardware business, and hardware isn't what it used to be," Reynolds says. "Their costs are high."
One choice that Hurd may have to face in the near future is exiting markets, says Gartner's Charles Smulders. Currently, HP participates in every geographic market, and makes PCs for budget seekers and luxury buyers. By contrast, Dell mostly concentrates on the mid- to high-end PCs, while Acer has forged a comeback through concentrating on laptops for Europeans.
"They have to make some hard choices in geographies and end-user markets," Smulders says.
Hurd's also a strong contrast to Fiorina, in terms of personality. She was touted as a rising corporate star when she joined HP from Lucent. Hurd is a mystery. He came up through the ranks of NCR and has been unheralded. When asked what they knew of him, both Reynolds and Smulders replied, "not much".
"He was on our contact list, but that's about it," Eunice says. "I know we sent him a Christmas card because I checked today."
CNET News.com's John Spooner contributed to this report.
