HP's Chief Financial Officer, HP Labs Director Both Retire

Published: December 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the wake of Hewlett-Packard's $14.5 million settlement last week with the California attorney general's office concerning the pretexting scandal from this summer and just prior to its security analysts meeting this week, the company has announced that two long-time, key employees of HP will be retiring.

Bob Wayman, 61, who has been the voice of calm on HP's quarterly conference calls for many years and has been wanting to retire for some time, is finally going to do it. Wayman started at HP in 1969 as a cost accountant and made his way up to the chief financial officer position in 1984. Wayman served on the HP board of directors from 1993 to 2002, and started edging toward the door then when he was brought back in as interim chief executive officer after Carly Fiorina, HP's embattled chairman and CEO, was ousted after a boardroom coup in February 2005. Wayman was instrumental in selling the acquisition of Compaq to Wall Street and investors in late 2001 and early 2002. Cathie Lesjack, HP's current treasurer and a senior vice president, will move into the CFO role. Lesjack has been at HP for 20 years in various finance roles and has been treasurer for three years.

Dick Lampman, who is also 61 and who has spent 35 years at HP as a researcher, also announced that he would be stepping down in 2007 as the senior vice president of research at HP and as the director of the HP Labs. HP Labs is comprised of six facilities, and this is where the company does a lot of the work that eventually ends up in products. Lampman's own work in the Computer Systems Lab, one of the six facilities, from 1988 to 1992, created a technology called the PA-Wide Word instruction set, which is the underlying technology that was used to create the EPIC architecture of the 64-bit Itanium processor. Itanium was, of course, a joint development effort between chip maker Intel and HP. Lampman was named director of HP Labs in 1999; he started out at the company in 1971 working for HP's measurement and computing units before joining the labs as a researcher in 1981. Shane Robison, HP's chief technology officer, is starting the search campaign to find Lampman's replacement. Lampman has agreed to stay on until a replacement is found.