Hewlett-Packard to cut 9K jobs in services unit

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Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest information-technology company, plans to lay off about 9,000 employees as it tries to cut costs in its back-office computing centers and deepens its use of software, rather than people, to do some of the work that those hubs require. The changes to these data centers, which are clusters of computers that run websites and process information for HP’s corporate customers, will be made over about three years, the company said Tuesday. The layoffs amount to about 3 percent of HP’s global work force, which had 304,000 employees as of October, the most recent figure available.

Cost savings have been a hallmark of CEO Mark Hurd’s five-year tenure at HP, the world’s biggest maker of PCs and printers and the top information-technology company by revenue. To boost its services business, the company, which is based in Palo Alto, Calif., bought Electronic Data Systems in 2008 and then cut 24,600 jobs as part of that acquisition.

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