22 October 2012, General Motors (GM) and Hewlett Packard (HP) announced a deal that will see 3,000 HP employees go to work for GM.

GM officials claim it’s part of a plan to reduce outsourcing and increase in-house operations, at least when it comes to information technology.

Randy Mott, GM Chief Information Officer, stated that when it comes to IT work, it’s more efficient and cost effective if done in-house: “These agreements with HP will enable us to accelerate the progress of our IT transformation by delivering increased innovation and speed of delivery to our GM business partners, and reduce the cost of ongoing IT operations…”

With IT workers they’re able to change projects rapidly, no need to re-tool  factories.

But don’t think this is actually 3,000 new jobs, as, according to Automotive News, most of the HP employees already do outsourced work for GM. According to InformationWeek, those HP workers are actually being hired away from HP, meaning they will become full fledged in-house GM employees (so this allows HP to layoff those employees, right into GM jobs).  Reports vary on how long this new deal will last, one report said it was multi-year.

A couple of weeks ago GM said they were going to hire 2,000 IT people in Michigan and Texas, but no clarification if this is part of the HP deal.  GM also said it would open new software centers.

Another part of the deal is that GM will buy software from HP for its IT operations.  HP officials called it “…the largest deployment of our full software portfolio in the world!”-George Kadifa, executive VP of HP Software

Add that to HP’s new Envy X2 hybrid tablet (which some reviewers are raving about) and maybe HP will be on its way back up, and even challenge Apple.