Hewlett-Packard Co. has reportedly begun purging non-core assets ahead of its planned split-up later this year, with anonymous insiders claiming that the first casualty could be its little-known TippingPoint firewall business. The rumored divestment would mark the latest milestone in what has been a long and twisting journey for the division.

The company of the same name on whose technology HP’s traffic filtering offering is based started its life at the height of the dot-com bubble as a maker of specialty low-cost computers that were offered at a major discount as part of Internet packages in an effort to drive consumer interest. As that business model started falling out of fashion, TippingPoint began developing the cybersecurity software that would become its primary business.

After building up a respectable customer base, the outfit sold out to 3Com Corporation for $442 million in 2005, only to see its new parent company itself get acquired by HP a few years later under then-CEO Mark Hurd. The next major episode in its journey would start two leadership changes later, when Meg Whitman took over the top leadership post in 2014.

The former eBay Inc. executive received a specific mandate to undo the work of her predecessor, which had cost the company years in lost engineering time due to a series of mistakes later compounded during the brief interim stint of Léo Apotheker as CEO. Whitman thus begun moving down the long list of strategic miscalculations until eventually reaching 3COM earlier this year.

The announcement that HP was selling a controlling stake in H3C Technologies Co., a Chinese joint venture between 3COM and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., to a state-owned holding company came in May. The rumored move to disinvest TippingPoint is merely a continuation of that effort, but will go somewhat differently, according to the Reuters report that broke the news.

The insiders cited by the news agency claimed that HP is shopping the business to private equity firms at a valuation of between $200 million to $300 million, a far cry from the $442 million that 3COM paid for the firm in 2005. That reflects the intensifying competition that TippingPoint has encountered in recent years , along, perhaps, with an urgency on HP’s part to find a buyer.

That only stands to reason given that its big break-up is right around the corner in November, after which its enterprise and consumer arms will part ways to become independent companies. The fewer redundant assets there are manage by that time, the smoother the split should go.

Photo via Geralt