Technology History | 3000 Hanover Street — The Split That Cost the Company Its Hyphen

Hewlett-Packard Company had a hyphen. Hewlett Packard Enterprise does not. The difference is not a typographical accident, and it is the quickest way to tell which of two companies a document belongs to after 1 November 2015. On that date HP separated into two independent businesses, and the announcement had gone out on letterhead printed with this address. The board approved the separation on 30 September 2015, thirteen months after the plan was made public in October 2014. HP shareholders of record on 21 October received one Hewlett Packard Enterprise share for every HP share they held. HPE took the Enterprise Group, Enterprise Services, Software and Financial Services — servers, storage, networking and the corporate contracts, worth an expected $53 billion a year. HP Inc. kept printing and personal systems, and kept the ticker HPQ. Meg Whitman ran the enterprise company and Dion Weisler ran HP Inc. HPE shares began regular trading on 2 November 2015 under the symbol HPE, and Whitman rang the opening bell that morning. The argument for splitting a 76-year-old company was that neither half could move at the speed its own market demanded while tied to the other. Whether it worked depends on which half you ask, and the answer keeps changing. 3000 Hanover Street was Hewlett-Packard's headquarters for decades and was Hewlett Packard Enterprise's first. The enterprise company did not stay. Its press release datelines track the moves better than any corporate history does: Palo Alto in 2015, San Jose by the Cray acquisition in 2019, Houston by the Frontier announcement in 2022. Hanover Street sits in what was Stanford Industrial Park, the leased research campus HP helped make the model for every science park that followed. Photo: LPS.1, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons — the headquarters entrance sign in 2013, two years before the split.