HP execs: Here's how we plan to save our most troubled business unit

The gossip among HP employees is that HP wants to clean up and sell its troubled Enterprise Services business unit, multiple employees have told us.

But HP execs are saying something different, telling investors that the the unit is "essential" to the new HP Enterprise (HPE) company, which will split off from HP on November 1, led by CEO Meg Whitman.

At HPE's first analyst meeting on Tuesday, CEO Meg Whitman and the unit's general manager Mike Nefkens used the word "essential" to describe the unit multiple times.

Whitman sees the unit as the linchpin to the whole company's success. She sees businesses hiring HP's consultants to help them move apps into the cloud, turn paper processes into digital ones, update their data centers and networks, secure their networks and data all while selling HP's other products and services along the way.

She's right. HP needs a healthy consulting unit. But ES has been anything but healthy for years. Revenues have been shrinking. Profit margins, unstable. Costs, high.

ES has taken the brunt of HP's multi-year ongoing layoffs that has shed over 51,000 people from HP's enormous payroll, with 5% more to go. HP has even resorted to some unusual tactics to shed workers, including turning groups of them into contractors.

On Tuesday, HP offered investors detailed plans on turning this "essential" ship around. Here they are: