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2013/10/08

HP Is Starting To Ban Some Of Its Employees From Working From Home, Just Like Yahoo Did

Earlier this year Yahoo banned working from home, forcing all employees to come into the company's offices. It was a huge, national controversy.

Now it looks like HP is trying to do something similar, though not nearly as harsh or as strict.

Arik Hesseldahl at All Things D reports, "HP employees are being told by bosses that if they can work at the office, they should work at the office."

He also says, "the rules governing work from home are being tightened and decisions about who gets to do it will now be made at a higher management level than before."

Hesseldahl got a look at an internal Q&A from HP to its staff, saying that it needs everyone in the office to turn the company around.

"During this critical turnaround period, HP needs all hands on deck," says the internal document. "We recognize that in the past, we may have asked certain employees to work from home for various reasons. We now need to build a stronger culture of engagement and collaboration and the more employees we get into the office the better company we will be."

As you can see, this is nowhere near as harsh or as strict as Yahoo's outright work from home ban.

But, that might be due to the fact that HP has ~300,000 employees worldwide. Hesseldahl estimates that ~80,000 work from home due in part to the fact that HP just doesn't have office space for all of its employees.

2013/02/02

Hewlett-Packard eliminará al menos 850 puestos de trabajo en Alemania

La empresa señaló que la medida se debe al "aumento de la eficiencia, la tercerización de servicios, y la consolidación con otros centros globales de distribución de HP".

El gigante de la informática Hewlett-Packard anunció este viernes que cerrará su división de software en Ruesselsheim, Alemania, lo que significará una pérdida de al menos 850 puestos de trabajo.

La fábrica alemana tiene alrededor de 1.100 empleados, pero HP informó que 250 de ellos "tendrán la oportunidad de ser transferidos a empresas de socios o clientes".

La empresa californiana, el mayor productor de ordenadores personales (PC) en el mundo, dijo que se eliminarán 850 puestos de trabajo debido al "aumento de la eficiencia, la tercerización de servicios, y la consolidación con otros centros globales de distribución de HP".

HP dijo que presentó sus planes a las autoridades alemanas de supervisión y espera cerrar las instalaciones a fines de octubre.

El año pasado, Hewlett-Packard anunció que sus planes generales de reestructuración eliminarían alrededor de 29.000 puestos de trabajo en todo el mundo.

Los recortes forman parte de un plan de su presidenta y directora ejecutiva Meg Whitman por subsanar las pérdidas de la empresa tras la disminución del número de usuarios de PC tradicionales en el mundo

www.emol.com

2012/11/22

FBI se une a investigación que involucra a Hewlett Packard y a Autonomy

Expertos contables advirtieron ayer que ésta podría ser una estrategia de HP para encubrir otra mala decisión de compra.

El escándalo contable de Hewlett Packard (HP) sigue creciendo. Ahora el FBI, respondiendo a una investigación de la Comisión de Valores y Bolsa de Estados Unidos (SEC, su sigla en inglés), está indagando las acusaciones de HP de que en su unidad Autonomy se produjeron ilícitos. Los expertos, en tanto, cuestionan si las acusaciones de HP son en realidad una forma de encubrir sus malas decisiones de compra.

HP presentó sus reclamos a la SEC por Autonomy, una firma británica que compró el año pasado, y la SEC le pidió asistencia al FBI, informó una fuente a Bloomberg. La firma tecnológica dijo que había descubierto “irregularidades, tergiversaciones y fallas de declaración” y “un deliberado esfuerzo de Autonomy por engañar a los accionistas”.

HP acusó el lunes a los ex administradores de Autonomy de varios delitos financieros, que resultaron en una amortización de US$ 8.800 millones. Más de US$ 5.000 millones se relacionan con “graves” problemas contables.

 

Malas decisiones 

Algunos expertos contables, sin embargo, alzaron la voz ayer advirtiendo que esta podría ser una estrategia de HP para desviar la atención de otra mala decisión de compra.

“El gran tema no es el fraude del que estamos hablando. El gran tema es que HP ha realizado adquisiciones que resultaron ser un desastre”, dijo a Bloomberg la ex contadora jefe de la SEC, y directora gerente de LitiNomics, Lynn Turner.

La amortización sigue al anuncio que realizó la empresa en agosto de que debería asumir un cargo por  US$ 9.200 millones, relacionados con su compra de Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Cuando las empresas hacen una adquisición, la diferencia entre el valor de los activos duros de la firma adquirida y el precio de compra se conoce como “goodwill”.

Las amortizaciones de Autonomy y EDS suman  US$ 18 mil millones, mientras que el balance de HP, desde abril, muestra casi US$ 45 mil millones en goodwill.

www.df.cl

2012/11/20

With Autonomy, H-P Bought An Old-Fashioned Accounting Scandal. Here's How It Worked.

The story was first told to me late last year, and like a lot of stories of financial impropriety inside a huge company, it was almost impossible to nail down. Hewlett-Packard‘s Autonomy division, my source told me, was vaporware writ large: A $10 billion software company with an overhyped flagship product that was literally being given away because customers didn’t have a use for it.

Today, Meg Whitman admitted as much. H-P announced it was writing off 88% of the purchase price for Autonomy and accused “some former members of Autonomy’s management team” of using “accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures” to hide the software company’s true performance and value.
In the release, H-P identified one of the oldest accounting tricks in the book, a variation on the one “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap used to accelerate revenue at Sunbeam — by getting customers to “buy” products now, under terms that really just borrowed from the future.
I spoke to my source again this morning and he detailed what he saw at H-P, from his position deep within the 300,000-employee company.

“What I saw was exactly what Meg Whitman wrote in her internal memo to employees,” my source said. “There was really sketchy accounting going on.”

Autonomy was founded as Cambridge Neurodynamics in 1991 by Michael Lynch, a Cambridge-educated computer scientist, according to this flattering profile by the Guardian after he left H-P in May. The company was based on the then-hot concept of Bayesian search, named after 18th-century mathematician Thomas Bayes, and ultimately developed an all-encompassing software package it called IDOL — Intelligent Data Operating Layer.

H-P today said it stands behind IDOL and well it should. Otherwise it would have to write off the entire $10 billion it paid for Autonomy. But my source doesn’t think much of the product, which is supposed to find all of a company’s data, wherever it resides, and whether or not it can be identified by specific words. (Typical example: Finding documents that contain the phrase “flightless bird” when you’re looking for “penguin.”)
“It’s the primary smoke and mirrors that Autonomy has used to make people think they’ve got something very impressive,” he told me. “It’s a fancy search engine.”

I attempted to reach Lynch this morning, unsuccessfully. His spokeswoman told Reuters he is still reviewing H-P’s allegations. H-P said it has referred the information it uncovered in a forensic accounting to fraud officials in the U.S. and the U.K.

Here’s what my source observed personally. Autonomy grew through acquisitions, buying everything from storage companies like Iron Mountain to enterprise software firms like Interwoven. They’d then go to customers and offer them a deal they couldn’t refuse. Say a customer had $5 million and four years left on a data-storage contract, or “disk,” in the trade. Autonomy would offer them, say, the same amount of storage for $4 million but structure it as a $3 million purchase of IDOL software, paid for up front, and $1 million worth of disk. The software sales dropped to the bottom line and burnished Autonomy’s reputation for being a fast-growing, cutting-edge software company a la Oracle, while the revenue actually came from the low-margin, commodity storage business.

“They would basically give them software for free but shift the costs around to make it look like they got $3 million in software sales,” said my source, who directly observed such deals.

Lynch’s management team also was practiced at the art of wringing attractive-looking growth out of a string of ho-hum acquisitions. The typical strategy was to bolt IDOL and other software onto a company’s existing products and try and convince customers to pay more for the “new” products. If that failed, they’d milk the existing customer base by halting development and outsourcing support, my source says, using the cash from the runoff business to fund more acquisitions.

“Mike Lynch was famous for saying Autonomy never put an end of life on any product,” said my source. “But the customers were screaming.”

Now, my source has never been a Mike Lynch fan. In sales meetings, he says, Lynch “loved to do vague and theoretical academic-type presentations to show what a visionary he was.”

And Autonomy may have some powerful features my source didn’t appreciate. The Defense Department reportedly is a customer. But from his perch within the company, it looked like a lot of vaporware wrapped up in fancy Cambridge talk and the kind of accounting tricks managers have engaged in since the dawn of publicly traded stock.

With its announcement today, H-P seems to agree. The company accused former managers of “a willful effort” “to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company in order to mislead investors and potential buyers. These misrepresentations and lack of disclosure severely impacted HP management’s ability to fairly value Autonomy at the time of the deal.”

Calling customers wouldn’t necessarily have uncovered the problem, my source says.
“I think these companies are embarrassed to admit they spent $10 million on software that doesn’t actually work,” he said.
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2012/06/23

Hewlett Packard podría reducir 1.000 puestos de trabajo en Alemania por crisis en Europa

El principal fabricante mundial de computadoras personales podría reducir hasta 1.000 puestos de trabajo en Alemania dentro de su plan de recortes en toda Europa, informó WirtschaftsWoche, citando representantes de personal no dentificados.

El grupo estadounidense Hewlett Packard, el principal fabricante mundial de computadoras personales, podría reducir hasta 1.000 puestos de trabajo en Alemania dentro de su plan de recortes en toda Europa, informó WirtschaftsWoche, citando representantes de personal no dentificados.

HP pretende recortar unos 8.000 puestos en Europa para finales de 2014, dijo la revista alemana, citando a funcionarios próximos a la compañía.
"Hasta 1.000 puestos (en Alemania) están extremadamente en peligro", dijo WirtschaftsWoche tras citar a un representante laboral.

HP, que emplea a más de 300.000 trabajadores en todo el mundo, dijo en mayo que el despido de 27.000 personas, o un 8% de su plantilla, se haría principalmente a través de jubilaciones anticipadas y generaría ahorros anuales de 3.000 a US$3.500 millones al final del ejercicio 2013/14.

HP, que registró un beneficio por encima de las estimaciones del mercado en el segundo trimestre, quiere usar los ahorros de costos en empleos para impulsar el crecimiento orgánico.

HP no estaba disponible en Alemania para realizar comentarios.

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