HEWLETT - PACKARD TIMES TWO.

• Author: GRAHAM, SANDY
• Position: Spinoff

H-P split in two. For Colorado. that means businesses bigger than the parts of their sum.

For the past 26 years, John Scruggs has told people he works for Hewlett - Packard Co., one of the best-known companies in the world. Now he can't.

It's not that Scruggs was laid off, quit or fired from H-P, until recently, Colorado's fifth-largest employer. He is among 4,950 Coloradans -- a little more than half of Hewlett-Packard's Colorado workforce -- who were among the 44,000-plus H-P employees worldwide broken off to form a separate company called Agilent Technologies Inc.

The breakup has reshaped the physical, economic and psychological landscapes of a $47 billion behemoth. In Colorado, that's meant some bad news, but the promise of two expanding companies and an even more impressive presence for Hewlett-Packard, uh, Agilent, that is, both of them.

"In a lot of cases, it's probably more difficult for us to act independently than it was for us to work together," said Scruggs, senior vice president and general manager of Agilent's automated test group in Colorado. "The learning process has been to think: This is H-P and this is Agilent."

Agilent's creation was announced in March 1999. Agilent's initial public offering garnered $2.1 billion, then the largest IPO in Silicon Valley history. Agilent (NYSE:A) began trading Nov. 18, and its separation becomes final this summer, when Hewlett-Packard distributes its remaining Agilent holdings to H-P stockowners.

Agilent has operations in more than 40 countries and customers in 120 countries. Its business encompasses H-P's semiconductor, chemical analysis, and medical products and -- ironically -- the test and measurement business that Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett launched in that now-famous garage in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1939. (One of the pair's first customers was Walt Disney Studios, which bought eight audio oscillators for use on Fantasia.)

The computer and imaging business, roughly $40 billion of 1998's $47 billion in revenues, keeps Hewlett-Packard's name and headquarters. Some 4,470 Coloradans remain H-P employees.

Company officials say the split creates two companies, each able to better respond to its market and grow more quickly.

H-P made its first move in mid-January, announcing the shutdown of its Greeley plant. Over 18 to 24 months, 644 hardcopy division workers will move to Fort Collins; 165 are to move to Dii Group's Dovatron division when Dii's acquisition of H-P's Greeley Storage Systems...