Hewlett-Packard recently concluded their Autonomy deal amidst investors’ disapproval and adjusting to a newly appointed CEO.  And today, they made another major announcement vital to their future.

HP just announced that Bethany Mayer has been appointed as senior vice president and general manager of the HP Networking business unit, effective immediately.  For the past four months, Mayer served as the unit’s interim leader and oversees HP Networking’s worldwide operations, reporting to Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Servers, Storage, Networking and Technology Services at HP.

“Bethany’s networking and business experience will help HP to continue to advance market share gains while transforming the industry by delivering superior products at greater value to clients,” said Donatelli. “During her interim leadership of HP Networking, Bethany exceeded performance goals resulting in our seventh straight quarter of double-digit growth. She is the right leader to accelerate this business.”

Mayer’s work for the last four months solidified HP Networking’s position as the number two vendor behind arch rival Cisco, marking its place in the networking market that has a double-digit market share.  She previously served as vice president of Marketing for Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking at HP, where she spearheaded programs that led to 14.6% revenue growth year over year in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2011.

Before joining HP in 2010, Mayer served as Blue Coat’s senior vice president, worldwide marketing and corporate development, worked as chief marketing officer at Mirapoint, and she also had various executive positions at JDSU, Vernier Networks, Skystream Networks, Cisco, Apple and Lockheed Martin.

Mayer’s formal appointment comes at a crucial time as HP increases their attacks on Cisco, claiming that their networking product line offers double the performance at cost savings as high as 40 percent compared to Cisco products.  A report published by the Dell’Oro Group showed that HP gained 2.5 percentage points worldwide for layer 2/layer 3 Ethernet switching revenue market share as well as 2.5 percentage points in router and 2.2 points in wireless local area network (WLAN) in the first quarter of 2011. Cisco’s share fell 5.8 points and declined by 3.1 points in router and 0.4 points in WLAN in the same period.

HP Networking sales director John Ansell will now be in charge of the entire HP UK business, replacing Barry Bonnett as he exits the company for undisclosed reasons.  Ansell confirmed the news with The Register and stated that he is “going through the transition period of moving from my role to Barry’s role.”  Ansell will be in position at the start of HP’s fiscal 2012 on 1 November.

“I’ve had numerous roles at HP from end user sales to management positions covering just about every sector, overseeing teams from five to 50 people and budgets from a few million up to half a billion pounds,” Ansell said.