After nearly 58 years under the same stock symbol, the companies that until last week made up the two core businesses of Hewlett-Packard Co. began trading as separate entities this morning. The split of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Inc.  and HP Inc. marks the conclusion of a complicated organizational maneuver that traces its origins long before the official announcement of the move 12 months ago to the reign of former chief executive Léo Apotheker.

The 30-year industry veteran floated the idea of a breakup shortly after he took over the helm in late 2010 as a way to free up resources from the then-combined company’s struggling consumer division to drive the adoption of its higher margin enterprise products. But the promise of improved profits didn’t convince investors, who took out their concerns on HP’s share price. And thus Apotheker found himself out of the board room less than a year later.

With Wall Street’s reaction to the breakup proposal still fresh in the mind, Meg Whitman took a different approach after she was tapped to replace the executive in September of 2011 and announced a five-year plan to return HP to its former glory in both the data center and the consumer space. The company made it just past the halfway mark before Apotheker’s foresight came to fruition, or slightly less than that when taking into account the fact that the two divisions have been operating independently from one another since August.

The last three months were spent sorting out the legal and other manner of bureaucratic chores involved in handling such a massive restructuring. With that now all wrapped up, Whitman is left the chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise while former lieutenant Dion Weisler is at the helm of the consumer-focused HP. The combined headcount of the two siblings is about 58,000 lower than it was in 2012, with up to 30,000 more positions set to be cut from HPE over the next few years.

The result will be a much slimmer and hopefully more efficient company that will find itself competing in a market that has changed almost as unrecognizably as it has. Two of HPE’s biggest rivals, EMC Corp. and Dell Inc. will merge next year to form the single biggest privately-held enterprise technology vendor in existence as part of a record-shattering $67 billion deal announced shortly before the split went official.

Photo via HP