Ray Bjorklund, an analyst at FedSources, said he didn't see HP's spin-off plans as having much impact on government buying decisions. He said the government has experience in navigating industry shifts, much like it did when HP bought Compaq.

"There is continuity here," Bjorklund said. "It's not like this becomes a radical upset of the whole selling channels."

Patrick Thibodeau covers cloud computing and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .

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