Hurd's effort to create a company that could compete in services as well as assemble end-to-end products for enterprises was paying off in ways that are hard to dispute.

In the first quarter of this year, HP held the No. 1 position in worldwide server market share, with 32.5%, said IDC.

Hurd, who took the HP job after Fiorina's departure in 2005, also rebuilt the company internally, tasking CIO Randy Mott with consolidating HP's data centers, automating the heck out of them, and cutting the application portfolio.

Employees were cut, including 25,000 announced in September 2008, the same month Wall Street started to implode in the financial crisis. Some analysts felt he went too far, cut too deep, and paid too much for EDS.

"Mark Hurd drove an amazing turnaround at HP and really made it operationally brilliant," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner Inc. But Hurd also "squeezed the image of HP as an innovator," with a lot of focus on cost. Bringing a stronger focus to innovation is something a new CEO could bring to HP.