Hat tip (as they say) to George O’Connor of Panmure Gordon (who in turn picked it up from t
he Sunday Times!) for news that Robert Youngjohns returns to the UK to run HP's Autonomy. He will report to George Kadifa Exec VP HP Software. Youngjohns joins HP from Microsoft where he was President of the North American region.
I doubt I can give a better comment on this than George’s – so I won’t try.
“Youngjohns first came to prominence in the 1990s when he led IBM’s AIX (Unix) division selling Unix into IBM existing customers who were thinking HP or Sun Unix systems - The Sunday Times says that beforehand he spent time with ‘Chelteham’. Mr Youngjohns then went off to the US, joined Sun, Calladus Software and more recently Microsoft. Now, HP has won him back to Cambridge. Of course, he won’t fix it and won’t last long. However, we had heard a whisper that one of our Plcs was trying to entice him back. The notable gap in Mr Youngjohn’s resume is the plc thing – let’s give him 9 to 12 months – HP is in chaos.”