HP has seen a lot of senior execs come and go recently – most of them going in the past month or so. The latest update however concerns a promotion of the company’s software head, Bill Veghte, to the role of chief strategy officer.

Veghte’s former post involved the management of Hewlett-Packard’s $3.2 billion software unit, and his current job places even more responsibility on his shoulders.  As the man who’ll be spearheading HP’s growth tactics, Vehthe will focus on all the key areas his firm is looking towards for future expansion. That amounts to not only software but also to a growing line-up of cloud and mobile initiatives, as well as HP’s enterprise hardware business, to name a few.

“From mainframes to client/server to the Internet, companies that identified the opportunity first and developed the right strategy came out on top,” Whitman, Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. “Bill has the knowledge and vision to keep us there.”

While HP gained a new C-rank, it lost the team that led Fortify Software and later joined the manufacturer as a part of the $265 million acquisition.  The seven executives have joined AlienVault, a startup that makes open-source security software of a particularly complex breed. The solution is designed to be used by banks, government and large enterprises that want to defend themselves from zero-day attacks – security breaches that are facilitated by the use of undiscovered loopholes.

Barmak Meftah, the new CEO and president of AlientVault, stressed that there wasn’t anything personal between the Fortify crew and HP.  Tom LaRoccaa, however, did not release a similar statement when he left his office as HP’s vice president of marketing and strategy to join Oracle. The software giant previously hired former Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd shortly after his controversial departure.