Breaking up is hard to do. That’s especially true when it involves a $110 billion split with more than 1,200 legal transactions, allocating 50,000 patents, and assigning or cloning 150,000 partner and customer contracts. And there is only just over a year to get it done.
The largest corporate split in history divided the 76-year-old Palo Alto-based tech giant Hewlett-Packard Co. into two smaller but still Fortune 50-sized companies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Hewlett Packard Inc. When the new companies became official entities on Nov .1, 2015, the lawyers at HPE, which now handles the server, storage, networking, software and enterprise services side of the original business (HP Inc. handles PCs and printers), could look back with a sense of pride and relief.
