One of the co-leaders of this study, Tony Prophet, senior vice president of operations for HP's Personal Systems Group, said the team came up with three key reasons for keeping this division. They were related to the supply chain benefits, internal IT issues and extensive back office integration.

In the end, the company concluded that the costs of separation are greater than its benefits.

"We are the largest purchaser of many of the commodities that go into both PCs and servers," said Prophet, citing memory technology, hard disk drives, microprocessors, and in some cases, Microsoft operating systems.

The servers and the PCs are built in similar supply chains and in the same factories, he said. The logistics in which they move are similar, Prophet added. "In the enterprise space, [PCs and servers] are often sold to the same customer," he said.

There are "many, many common threads between the PC business and the server business from the component level all the way to the customer level," said Prophet