If [HP] brings in someone who says, ‘I’m not so sure [3Com] was a smart idea,’ they could have a few bumps in the road.

That’s for sure. Of course, given the amount of money laid out this year for the 3Com deal and the Palm acquisition, I think the board of directors will want to hire a new CEO who is committed to making those investments work. At the same time, a new CEO will probably be more willing to cut his losses with an acquisition that isn’t working if said acquisition didn’t happen on his watch.

So the board will probably hire a CEO who will commit to HP Networking’s 3Com/H3C/TippingPoint integration at least for a few years. But what about the rest of the company?

Over at CTOEdge, Mike Vizard pointed out that HP employees were suffering from low morale even before this Hurd scandal hit. He points to Glassdoor.com, a site where employees rate their CEOs and review what it’s like to work at their companies. HP has a Glassdoor rating of 2.4 on a scale of 1 to 5, based on 1,353 ratings. Hurd has an approval rating of just 34%. Employees tell the site that executives focus too much on numbers.

HP has enjoyed a lot of success under Hurd’s leadership. It has solidified its position as the #2 enterprise networking vendor, grown its share of server sales and made a lot of money on services with its EDS acquisition. But whispers of poor morale combined with this dramatic loss of its CEO certainly justifies some hand-wringing — by the media and by HP customers — especially since Cisco is being so aggressive in competing directly with it on networking and servers. As Vizard asks in his CTOEdge column: “Can an HP that is already pretty divided internally come together to drive the innovations needed to compete across a range of business segments that to one degree or another are under siege?”

HP’s CFO Cathie Lesjak will act as CEO on an interim basis while the company looks for a replacement.

I’m not going to bother looking into the details of what Hurd allegedly did. He’s gone now. And that’s huge. This is one of the biggest technology companies in the world. It is poised to compete for a huge share of the networking market. And suddenly the CEO who is credited with turning HP around after some years of struggle under mediocre leadership (*cough* Carly Fiorina *cough*) is gone.

What happens now?

HP ProCurve has long been a niche, low-cost networking vendor popular among small and midsized businesses and enterprise campus networks. Under Hurd’s leadership, the ProCurve business became the number two enterprise networking vendor, and took an even bigger leap forward earlier this year when it closed a deal to acquire 3Com and its promising H3C networking and TippingPoint network security brands.

Now Hurd is gone. There is no way of knowing what direction a new CEO would take the company. It’s probably safe to say HP’s board of directors will expects a new CEO to maintain a commitment to networking, given the sizable investment HP made in 3Com. HP has a lot of momentum in that area, but will we see some shifts in strategy under new leadership? Who knows?

It will be important to watch how other key HP executives respond to this scandal. Senior Vice President Marius Haas, general manager of HP Networking, has been widely credited with the rise of HP’s networking business. Above him is Executive Vice President Dave Donatelli, general manager of HP’s Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. If either of those guys jump ship, take note.

Also, HP is a public company. When a public company has a leadership shakeup in the midst of a run of success, Wall Street balks. If the stock price stumbles badly, HP’s leadership may be forced to make some short-range scrambling in response.