Computerworld — With Mark Hurd's sudden resignation, Hewlett-Packard Co. has a golden opportunity to hire a CEO with business savvy in mobile, wireless and smartphone areas, helping give the mature technology behemoth a needed and vital strategic direction.

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Hurd oversaw the purchase of Palm Inc. and its WebOS for $1.2 billion in April, so clearly HP sees the value of smartphones and tablets in its future plans.

But some analysts have openly questioned whether the Palm purchase is enough to give HP the leg up it needs for a coming group of handheld and wireless products that are expected to gradually replace desktop and laptop computers for many uses.

It isn't clear how high a priority smartphones and tablets are at HP (HPQ), given the company's enormous product portfolio, which includes an enterprise servers and storage division that was worth $15 billion in 2009 revenues. Smartphones are a small part of a group, Personal Systems, that overall hit $35 billion in 2009 revenues, although that group also includes consumer electronics, desktops and laptops. Printers are in a group all their own, reaching $24 billion in 2009 revenues, while consulting services were $35 billion and software hit $4 billion.

Several analysts said that while a CEO with a clear focus on smartphones and tablets sounds like a smart strategic direction for HP over the long haul, it could undercut HP's broad base of products and services in its current and near-term operations.

"HP's board needs to focus on getting a CEO that can run the entire company, not just focus on mobile," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "HP is very diverse, and I think they would be best served with a general manager who could get all the various divisions running smoothly."

Focusing on mobile products would be "way too far down the stack," added Gartner Inc. (IT) analyst Ken Dulaney. "A networking CEO would be better. Their big battles are with Cisco going forward."

HP acquired networking products maker 3Com in late 2009 for $2.7 billion in HP's quest to be a full-fledged networking products company that would be number two to networking king Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO)

Ramon Llamas, an analyst at research firm IDC, said he doesn't see HP hiring a "mobile wiz" as its next CEO, partly because of HP's product diversity and the nascent nature of smartphones and tablets both at HP and elsewhere. "As a mobile analyst, I'd like to see HP go whole hog in mobile, but they need to look at their entire business, too."

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