NEW YORK --
Venturing outside the travel industry, Cendant named former
Hewlett-Packard executive Jeff Clarke as CEO of Travelport, the new
name for its Travel Distribution Services unit, soon to be a
stand-alone company.
Clarke begins May 1
as president and CEO of Travelport, which includes Orbitz, Galileo,
CheapTickets, Gullivers Travel Associates, OctopusTravel.com,
AsiaHotels.com, eBookers and numerous other entities.
The Travelport job
will be Clarke's first as a CEO. He will work closely with
Travelport Chairman Gordon Bethune, especially in preparation for
the October spin-off, officials said.
Although he has no
travel industry experience, Clarke is well schooled in carrying out
company integrations.
He led one of the
largest technology integrations in history, the merger of
Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, while serving as Hewlett-Packard's
executive vice president of merger operations.
His final post at
Hewlett-Packard, which he left in 2003, was executive vice
president of global operations for supply chain management.
Most recently,
Clarke was chief operating officer of Computer Associates, a
position he took in May 2004, a month after joining that software
company as its chief financial officer.
Computer
Associates, headquartered in Islandia, N.Y., acquired and
integrated almost a dozen companies when Clarke was on board. He is
credited with stabilizing Computer Associates, which was in the
midst of an accounting restatement when he was hired.
Gordon Haff, an IT
analyst at Illuminata, a research firm in Nashua, N.H., said the
integration of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq went "more smoothly than
people anticipated" and that it is "generally regarded that Clarke
did a pretty effective job there."
Charles King, the
principal analyst at Pundit Research in Hayward, Calif., said
Cendant's selection of Clarke "is probably a very good
choice."
King said Clarke
did an "admirable" job in straightening out the finances at
Computer Associates.
At Cendant, Clarke
replaces Sam Katz, who was chairman and CEO of TDS until December,
when he left the company amid criticism that TDS was struggling to
overcome operational challenges.
Meanwhile,
Cendant's Flo Lugli, in an interview at the Travel Industry
Association's TravelCom conference in New York last week, said the
TDS name change to Travelport, which had been the name of one of
Cendant's corporate travel offerings, doesn't mean there is a
change in strategic direction.
"We wanted a name
that represents who we are," Lugli said. "We are in travel, and we
are a portal for travel and services."
Travelport For
Business and Orbitz For Business, Cendant's two business travel
offerings, will continue under the Travelport Corporate Solutions
umbrella.
To contact
reporter Dennis Schaal, send e-mail to [email protected].