Hewlett-Packard Co.’s board on Thursday named Meg Whitman as the new president and CEO of the troubled tech giant, replacing Leo Apotheker less than a year after he was given the job. “We are fortunate to have someone of Meg Whitman’s caliber and experience step up to lead HP,” Ray Lane, who moved from board’s non-executive chairman to executive chairman, said in a prepared statement. “We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead.” Lane said of Apotheker, who resigned from HP’s board Thursday, “We very much appreciate Leo’s efforts and his service to HP since his appointment last year. The board believes that the job of the HP CEO now requires additional attributes to successfully execute on the company’s strategy. Meg Whitman has the right operational and communication skills and leadership abilities to deliver improved execution and financial performance.” Under the terms of his HP contract, Apotheker could walk away with about $26 million in severance payments and stock, though the value of the stock – which fully vests in 2013 – could change depending on HP’s performance, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I am honored and excited to lead HP,” Whitman, 55, said in the statement. “I believe HP matters – it matters to Silicon Valley, California, the country and the world.” A former CEO of eBay Inc. who ran an unsuccessful campaign for California governor last year, Whitman joined HP’s board as part of a shake-up engineered earlier this year by Apotheker and Lane. She has a reputation as a strong executive and oversaw eBay’s rapid growth. But she was lambasted for eBay’s purchase of Internet-calling firm Skype for $2.5 billion. And some analysts have questioned whether her experience at eBay, which serves a consumer market, was enough to prepare her for the job at HP, which increasingly sells computer systems and other technology to corporate and government customers. “On the plus side, she’s a known quantity,” said Charles King, president and principal analyst of Hayward, Calif.-based Pund-IT. “She’s certainly recognizable. If somebody asked you to name the five or six CEOs in Silicon Valley who had achieved rock-star status, I think she’d be on the list.” On the other hand, he said, “HP’s primary focus areas are not her particular areas of expertise.” Moreover, while HP’s board is trying to move the company’s emphasis to be more in line with that of Oracle and IBM, he said, “that’s not something that I think Whitman has any experience in.” While Whitman has run a big company and “knows the condition of HP intimately,” Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, worried that she had “kind of left eBay on a sour note” and may not have the experience needed to run a company the size of Hewlett-Packard. “So I think that bodes badly for HP.” Citing the upheaval around Apotheker’s short tenure and his attempts to shift HP’s strategy, Whitman “is walking into an incredibly challenging situation,” added IDC analyst Crawford Del Prete. In particular, Del Prete said uncertainty over the future of HP’s personal computer business has left a broad opening for Dell and other rivals to go after HP’s corporate customers. But Del Prete said he thinks Whitman brings strong attributes to the job. “She’s run a huge company. She’s grown it and created a great brand,” he said, adding that he believes she understands the power of the Internet and cloud computing, in which information and services are delivered online. And despite criticism that Whitman lacks experience serving corporate and government markets that are important to HP’s overall business. Del Prete said he believes she could overcome that issue. “I believe Meg is a seasoned executive and will either empower people that are more than capable in those areas or she will become versed in those areas herself.” Several analysts said Whitman was a logical choice as a temporary replacement, but questioned her qualifications to run the company on a permanent basis. “We believe investors would be more willing to applaud such a CEO transition if the company were to consider an enterprise-focused industry veteran, with a background to drive meaningful broad-based changes on a large scale, as the permanent CEO,” wrote Aaron Rakers of the Stifel Nicolaus investment firm, in a research note on Thursday. Rakers went on to cite David Donatelli, the executive vice president in charge of HP’s corporate computing business, as a logical candidate. Other analysts have also mentioned Donatelli, who previously served as a top executive at data-storage giant EMC. Donatelli “is well-regarded by customers, employees and investors,” said Brian Alexander, an analyst at Raymond James, in a note to clients Thursday. Whitman’s appointment and the abrupt transition may also be frustrating to other top members of HP’s executive team, Rakers added, mentioning PC division chief Todd Bradley, printing chief Vyomesh Joshi and Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak. Bradley and Joshi have been viewed as potential candidates for the top job at HP in the past; Lesjak served as interim CEO before Apotheker was hired, although she said then that she did not want the job on a permanent basis. There was widespread agreement, however, that it was time for Apotheker to go. During his tenure at HP, the stock has dropped about 44 percent, the company’s earnings have been unimpressive and his plans to shift HP away from its mainstay business have met with skepticism. Many investors were shocked at his announcement in August that HP was exploring divesting its $40 billion-a-year personal computer business. Critics said Apotheker should have held off saying anything until he had a clearer plan for the division, and industry analysts worried that the disclosure could hurt PC sales, especially on the eve of the back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons. Others were stunned at his decision to halt sales of HP’s new TouchPad tablet and smartphones based on the webOS software it acquired when it bought Palm for $1.2 billion last year, because it was such an abrupt change of course for the company, and called his $10 billion proposed purchase of business software-maker Autonomy exorbitant. But the criticism hasn’t just been directed at Apotheker. Some industry experts contend HP’s board also bears responsibility for the company’s seeming lack of direction. Before Apotheker was named HP’s CEO, no one on the company’s board – aside from its four search-committee members – met with him, according to a New York Times report. In a note to his clients Tuesday, Toni Sacconaghi Jr. of Bernstein Research said his “conversations with shareholders and investors over the past month revealed a level of exasperation that we have not seen directed at HP or any other company in our universe in our 13 years following the sector.”