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Hewlett-Packard is just several months away from breaking in half and creating two Fortune 50 companies. One of those companies now has a new logo.
HP CEO Meg Whitman is unveiling the logo for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the company that she will run and that will focus on enterprise IT products and services, such as servers, storage appliances, networking gear and cloud solutions. (The other company, HP Inc., will sell PCs, printers and other consumer-focused offerings.)
In a post on an HP blog, Whitman showed off the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo, a simple design that has the company name in black underneath an understated green-outlined rectangle. The logo—a change from the current logo, which shows lower-case “hp” in blue—encapsulates what Hewlett Packard Enterprise stands for, the CEO wrote, from its enterprise focus to innovation, agility and collaboration.
“To bring our ideals to life, we needed a logo and a design system that would be singular and defining,” Whitman wrote. “We needed a design that would express our renewed commitment to focus and simplicity. And we needed a logo that would be as transformative, flexible and agile as we are becoming, while standing out from the pack. Finally, the logo needed to work across all the ways we would use it.”
The challenge was finding a design that pays homage to HP’s past while supporting what the company is today and what it will be in the future, she wrote.
“It’s different, I know. What I love about our new logo design is how it stands out among our competitors. The color we picked is no accident. I wanted us to stand apart. The other thing that stands out for me is its simplicity. But, guess what, that’s what we’re going to be about—easy to do business with and precise in our work, our engineering and our innovation.”
Whitman, formerly the top executive for online auction site eBay, took over as HP’s CEO in 2011, inheriting a massive company that was being challenged by a rapidly changing tech industry and plagued by executive turmoil. A year later, she outlined a multi-year restructuring plan that included slashing more than 50,000 jobs, though she resisted pressure from analysts and some investors to shed the struggling PC business, arguing instead that HP was “better together.”
However, last year, Whitman announced plans to break HP in two, saying that each business could thrive by focusing more on its own technologies. She argued last year that the split was made possible by the success of the restructuring initiative. The two new companies “go after quite different market segments, and we would have the opportunity to align rewards and results [and] to respond to customer needs faster with these two big companies,” she said during an interview in October 2014.