Dell loses another senior exec

The head of Dell's commercial business group will be leaving the company very soon, the company said in a surprise announcement late on Wednesday in which it revealed that this division is being split into two.

Joe Marengi, 51, was responsible for units serving medium business, large corporate, government, education and health care customers in the United States. He will retire at the end of March. Marengi is the third major Dell executive to announce his retirement recently.

In December Dell's chief financial officer, Jim Schnieder, announced he was leaving, as did John Medica, senior vice president of the product group. Responsibility for Marengi's group is now being divided between two of his reports.

A Dell spokesperson told ZDNet UK on Friday that Marengi's Commercial Business Group will be split into to two distinct organizations: a Corporate Business Group and a Public Business Group.

Some activity was inevitable during a year in which Dell has suffered two major traumas. In August the company had a major product recall when it had to ask millions of customers to return their batteries for safety checks and replacement.

And earlier in the year, Dell announced that it had been sucked into the long-running Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC) investigation into the share options controversy.

Dividing the commercial business unit into two for the purposes of core management would make sense, as Dell has already set about dividing its product business into new blocks. Product development is now divided into two distinct groups: the Business Product Group and the Consumer Product Group.