HP fired three major sales executives Thursday, including former server group head Peter Blackmore, in a management shakeup following a disappointing quarter for HP's server division.

Blackmore was executive vice president of the Customer Solutions Group (CSG), a new group formed last December to manage direct sales to enterprise and public-sector customers worldwide. He will be replaced by Mike Winkler, currently executive vice president and chief marketing officer. Winkler will keep those responsibilities in his new role.

Jim Milton , CSG senior vice president and managing director of the Americas region, and Kasper Rorsted, CSG senior vice president and managing director for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, were also dismissed. Milton will be replaced by Jack Novia, senior vice president and general manager of HP's Technology Solutions Group. Rorsted's replacement is Bernard Meric, senior vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group in EMEA.

Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina announced the changes in an e-mail sent to HP's employees, which was then sent to the media.

"We thank Peter, Jim, and Kasper for their years of service and dedication," Fiorina wrote.

HP's Enterprise Servers and Storage Group suffered through a painful second quarter, Fiorina said in HP's second-quarter earnings conference call held earlier on Thursday. The Palo Alto, Calif., company had been expected to report earnings next week.

A planned migration to a new ordering processing and supply chain system went very poorly during the quarter, Fiorina said on the conference call. The European operations were hurt by aggressive discounting and poor channel management, she said.

Blackmore came to HP along with several former Compaq executives, including Milton and Rorsted, when the two companies merged in May of 2002. He was originally the head of HP's server division, but in December 2003 that division was folded in with the services and software teams under the Technology Solutions Group (TSG), headed by Ann Livermore, formerly head of HP Services.

Blackmore was then given a role as head of CSG, which was designed as the sales arm for enterprise hardware, software and services customers. The idea was to create more revenue by having one sales team market all of HP's products together, rather than asking a customer to work with separate hardware, software, and services sales teams.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.