Tech giants HP and Symantec have each announced plans to carve themselves in two to provide a better focus on the information management market.

HP Enterprise is hiving off its PC and printer business into a separate organisation that will retain the HP name and current logo. CEO Meg Whitman who will stay on with HP Enterprise says it will become more “nimble” as a result. It will also be left with less debt.

Bloomberg reports that in the decade before she took over as chief executive officer, Hewlett-Packard spent almost three times as much on takeovers and related banker fees — about $US66 billion in all — than it was left with in market value at its lowest level.

“Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will accelerate innovation across key next-generation areas of the portfolio,” said Whitman.

"Although we are less bullish on this split than on the EBay/PayPal split announced a week ago, we still think that this development is a small net positive for the stock," FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi wrote in a research note.

The Symantec Board last week approved a plan to separate the company into two, independent publicly traded companies by the end of December 2015: one business focused on security and one business focused on information management (IM). 

“It has become clear that winning in both security and information management requires distinct strategies, focused investments and go-to market innovation,” said Michael A. Brown, Symantec president and chief executive officer. “Separating Symantec into two, independent publicly traded companies will provide each business the flexibility and focus to drive growth and enhance shareholder value.”

Symantec says its IM businesses IM business generated revenue of $US2.5 billion in 2014 including backup and recovery; archiving; eDiscovery; storage management; and information availability solutions.

Immediate plans for this sector include delivering new integration with cloud providers that enable its customers to help manage data across public and private clouds, such as cloud connectors for NetBackup and Recovery-as-a-Service (RaaS) for Azure Cloud.

Symantec also has plans to deliver what it calls an “intelligent information fabric layer” that will allow customers to view a map of their information, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), to reduce the risk that their confidential and sensitive information is compromised.