McCartney would ideally like the PC unit to remain a part of HP so every product comes from a single organization.

McCartney isn't rattled by the management shakeups, but leaders shape a company's direction, which helps shape product and purchase choices, McCartney said. He would like Whitman to bring stability and decisively communicate product plans for the next years so he can stabilize Purdue's internal IT road map.

"We buy the product set, we don't buy the CEO. To the extent HP is delivering services and products we are buying it's great. When they don't, that's not great," McCartney said.

Customers are still trying to digest the change in leadership, but hope for a stable product line, said Nina Buik, the chief marketing officer for Connect, an independent user community of HP's enterprise product customers. Connect has more than 50,000 members worldwide.

"I think people are looking at things that affect their business strategy. It's the product and product road map," Buik said. Some events over the last year, such as Oracle's decision to stop application development for Intel's Itanium chip architecture, have also made HP enterprise users fix internal road maps.