HP Creates Mobile Business Unit, Tablets Are Focus
- by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, August 17, 2012
Hewlett-Packard has created a mobile business unit for consumer tablets, computers and other devices in the company's reaffirmation of a renewed commitment in "mobility
solutions," an HP spokesperson confirmed Friday, although no official announcement had been made at the time.
The news, first reported by The Verge, comes about a year after HP said it would stop producing the TouchPad and webOS phones about 16 months after it acquired Palm. In late July, HP began teasing its new tablet in ads.
The business unit, called Mobility GBU (global business unit), will focus on consumer tablets, eventually expanding to additional segments and categories, such as phones.
The notebook team and forthcoming commercial tablet team will remain within the PC GBU under James Mouton. Alberto Torres, who oversaw the MeeGo products and platform at Nokia as executive vice president, will join HP as senior vice president of mobility.
Some view the new business unit as a sign of a changing industry.
Earlier this month, HP introduced a service that increases the security of data in cloud storage and simplifies the move of data from one storage system to another. It keeps information from disparate departments isolated from one another. With both a mobility and storage service at hand, it would enable HP to ramp up a marketing services group supporting mobile marketing and advertising cloud services. This would mean tweaking its business model to adapt to the times, similar to Adobe.
As HP builds out its mobile business unit, the company may find it helpful to know that men are more likely to click through on mobile ads presented within apps than women at 42% and 32%, respectively. Mobile ads presented in both sites and apps have a high click-through rate -- 42% and 37%, respectively. A majority of advertisers provide mobile-optimized experiences when consumers click through on ads.
Adobe introduced a series of multichannel marketing tools in the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform in June 2011, allowing marketers to tap data across a company when launching or monitoring campaigns.
