PALO ALTO — Hewlett Packard becomes two companies next week, having grown so big through acquisitions that it was in danger of losing its competitive edge.

It’s the biggest split-up in Silicon Valley history, as a computer giant with over $100 billion in revenue becomes two Fortune 100 companies. One will tackle the rapidly changing technology business and the other will sell personal computers and printers.

And it’s not a moment too soon, say analysts, describing HP as a colossus that was difficult to manage and at risk of falling behind the curve of the massive transition to mobile and cloud computing that has upended the traditional role of corporate IT.

“It got too big to manage, with too many moving parts,” said Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy.

According to HP CEO Meg Whitman, the company is becoming “smaller and more focused” to keep up with the rapidly changing data center business. “Our timing is absolutely perfect,” she told analysts in September. “Our customers are in a period of transformation and transition. They are grappling with huge changes in their industry with massive shifts in the technology landscape.”

The two companies may be independent, but they will be neighbors, each operating out of HP’s sprawling Palo Alto site, sharing a fitness center and access to the famed HP Labs research and development center.

On Monday, HP divides into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which will sell data center technology and services to businesses, and HP Inc., which inherits a $6.8 billion debt load (and $4.5 billion in cash) and will manage a declining market for computers and printers.

HP Enterprise, the company that’s being spun off, gets a new stock ticker, HPE, a new board and Whitman as its chief executive. HP Enterprise will keep the headquarters building at 3000 Hanover St., in Palo Alto, while HP Inc. moves up the hill to 1501 Page Mill Road, a 1960s-era building that contains the original offices of founders William Hewlett and David Packard, with furniture and decor from that time.

The separate PC and printer company will have a new 3D printing business group, anticipating exploding demand. HP’s 3D printer is close to commercial availability, according to reports.

“We like to say we’re a $50 billion startup,” said Tracy Keogh, HP’s executive vice president for human resources, who will have the same job at HP Inc.

Whitman, who will retain some control over HP Inc. as its non-executive board chairman, has been on a drive to turn around HP since becoming its CEO in 2011, replacing Leo Apotheker, who engineered what proved to be the disastrous $11 billion acquisition of the British firm Autonomy.

The split is a massive undertaking, breaking up a legendary company that was born more than 75 years ago when two young Stanford engineering grads named Bill and Dave founded the company in a garage in 1939, flipping a coin to see whose name would be first.

HP prospered by making test and measurement equipment for engineering tasks, but that business was spun out in 1999 as a new company, Agilent Technologies.

The controversial acquisition of personal computer maker Compaq in 2002 by then CEO Carly Fiorina, now a Republican candidate to be the next U.S. president, created an HP that was a major force in the consumer PC market. But it also resulted in a gigantic organization that was pulled in different directions by its enterprise and consumer parts.

“It grew very unwieldy,” said Carl Brooks of 451 Research.

“The split seems to be fairly logical,” he said, and “will give each branch the freedom to proceed more independently to do what they think they need to do to continue to succeed.”

Although probably known by most people as a company that makes printers and PCs, by head count the company’s largest operations are in selling technology and services to other enterprises.

The split will be invisible to many, although not to the 30,000 people who will be laid off, many whose jobs will be moved to low cost countries.

“It’s a huge change and not a huge change for a lot of people at the same time,” said Jayson Noland Sr., an analyst with Robert W. Baird. “I say that because a lot of their partners, customers and employees engage with the company in a very specific way. I don’t know that they’re going to notice a significant change one way or the other.”

Investors have a lot riding on the deal.

“It’s a good move,” said analyst David Bartoletti of Forrester Research. “It will focus HP. The challenge is that the data center infrastructure business, while it’s still profitable and going to grow, will not grow nearly as fast as the public cloud is growing.”

Rob Enderle, an analyst of Silicon Valley tech companies, is convinced the split was engineered to attract a suitor for HP Enterprise, possibly the storage giant EMC. But EMC announced this month that it is being acquired by Dell.

“She’s the bride at the altar,” Enderle said. “The end result is that HP Enterprise is now packaged for sale except there’s nobody to buy them, except maybe Oracle.”

To some observers, HP is a giant laid low, a remnant of the behemoth that once bestrode Silicon Valley.

.

“People looked at what it was, and want some of that back,” said technology analyst Moorhead. “I think people in different parts of the world see it differently. They say, ‘Yeah, they had some hard times but they’re in a heck of lot better situation now than before.’ I look at it as a glass half full.”

Contact Pete Carey at 408-920-5419 Follow him on Twitter.com/petecarey