HP is stretching its legs a bit, hiring people from outside the company to take care of certain operations.

Today, we see that George Kadifa is going to step through HP's doors to work on their software department. Unlike what was expected, however, Kadifa will not be working on improving Autonomy (News - Alert), a search software company that HP just recently purchased for $10.3 billion. He’ll rather engage in a number of other software projects that HP has under its sleeve.

Kadifa is probably one of the most intriguing choices that HP has made for people to include in its roster, particularly because of his previous work as a software expert that specialized in turning projects into golden eggs at Silver Lake Partners, a private equity firm that purchases chunks of mature companies. In his time, Kadifa has been working with Serena Software and Vantage Data Centers.

Kadifa now hops into the EVP chair at HP's software department. Preceding him was Bill Veghte (News - Alert), who will now work as COO. Despite Veghte's promotion, Kadifa will answer to Meg Whitman, CEO.

Kadifa has a long history working with software companies, gathering a reputation for being a “magician” of sorts, starting with his experience as the SVP at Oracle (News - Alert) a bit over a decade ago. After he finished his work, he became CEO at Corio, one of the pioneers of SaaS. IBM eventually bagged the company in '05, but Kadifa didn't stop working with Corio until a few years later. Right after that, he started with Silver Lake.

The new member of HP will work on the firm’s enterprise software suite, a software package that helps businesses gather information more quickly and efficiently.

If you remember HP as a company that sells computers and printers, that’s not really the direction they’re heading in anymore. The company has decided to enter the software business, and it hit the ground running. Its move toward software started with its acquisition of Autonomy.