General Motors will hire thousands of HP’s current employees working in IT services as part of its CIO Randy Mott’s complete overhaul of the way the US automaker does IT, the companies announced earlier this week.

About 3,000 HP employees currently providing IT services to GM as contractors will get onto the customer’s payroll. An HP spokeswoman told All Things D that the move would not alter the 29,000-head workforce reduction target the company set in September.

“These agreements with HP will enable us to accelerate the progress of our IT transformation by delivering increased innovation and speed of delivery to our GM business partners and reduce the cost of ongoing IT operations,” Mott said. “Transforming our internal IT operations will give us the resources, tools and flexibility we need to provide better services and products to our global GM customers.”

Mott served as HP’s CIO until being ousted in 2011 during a management-restructuring effort.

Moving from a “highly out-sourced to a largely in-sourced” model, GM wants to become more of an IT innovator than it has been, the company said. One step it is taking to develop its tech chops is opening a series of “IT innovation centers” in Austin, Texas, Warren, Michigan, and in two other, at this point unannounced, locations.

In addition to taking on a few thousand of its employees, GM has bought some new HP software, including the IT Performance Suite (a management solution for an entire enterprise IT infrastructure), the Enterprise Security Suite and Vertica and Autonomy products (both are HP’s data-analytics brands).

HP and GM have had a business relationship for more than 20 years.

Another part of Mott’s overhaul is data center consolidation, going from 23 facilities around the world to two in Michigan, he told Information InformationWeek in July. GM has spoken publicly about at least one of these data centers, a US$130m construction project in Warren, announced in June 2011 and slated for completion in 2015.

When HP CEO Meg Whitman initially announced her big restructuring plan in May, the company said it would lay off or send into early retirement 27,000 employees over a span of three years. In September, however, HP bumped that headcount up to 29,000.

In August, in a third-quarter earnings announcement, HP said 4,000 staff had left since the restructuring plan was put in motion.

HP’s services business, many of whose employees will soon become GM employees, has been in trouble. The company said in August it would write the value of this business down by $8bn, suffering overall profit reduction as a result.

That same month, HP let John Visentin, its former head of enterprise services, go, replacing him with Mike Nefkens, who had previously overseen its enterprise services business in Europe, Middle East and Africa.