3,000 HP IT Staffers Will Go to Work for GM

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

As part of its massive plan to bring IT operations back in-house, General Motors has announced that it intends to hire 3,000 IT workers from Hewlett-Packard. Those workers already supported GM, which contracted with HP for IT services, but now they will be actual GM employees.

InformationWeek’s Chris Murphy wrote, “GM CIO Randy Mott, on board since February, thinks his IT workers can be more efficient and effective as in-house employees. The 3,000 HP people GM is bringing onboard have been running and developing IT systems for the automaker in locations worldwide. Their hiring is part of an IT overhaul led by Mott that will move the company from relying on outsourcers for 90% of its IT operations to only 10%.”

Arik Hesseldahl from All Things D observed, “This in-sourcing plan was spearheaded by GM CIO Randy Mott, who happens to be the former CIO of HP itself. Mott, you may recall, was ousted at HP in a June 2011 management shakeup about three months before the end of Léo Apotheker’s 11-month tenure.”

ZDNet’s David Chernicoff noted, “GM, who currently operates 23 datacenters worldwide, is planning on reducing that number to two as part of their three-year plan. The plan also includes a goal of reducing the number of different applications that do the same job, streamlining and improving operations by standardizing on a much smaller set of appropriate backend applications. And while they are doing this they expect to increase the number of internal IT jobs by as many as 10,000.”

Computerworld’s Patrick Thibodeau reported, “Despite the loss of outsourcing agreements, HP will continue to have a major role at GM under the new agreement. The contract calls for the expanded internal GM IT operation to rely on HP software, including the networking, operating and monitoring software in the IT Performance Suite. GM also agreed to use HP’s Enterprise Security Suite, and the data analytics and business intelligence software in the Vertica and Autonomy Software product lines. The value of new software contract wasn’t disclosed, though George Kadifa, executive vice president, HP Software, said ‘this is the largest deployment of our full product portfolio in the world, second to none, at this stage.'”