HP today announced that it would lay off thousands of workers. The company today confirmed last week's rumors that it planned to cut between 8 and 10 percent of its workforce as part of a massive restructuring plan.

Late last week we heard whisperings that HP had a huge restructuring plan in the works, one that would see the company cut more than 20,000 people in order to reinvest. HP today announced its plans for a multi-year restructuring initiative that will see it axe 27,000 jobs.

HP will eat a $1.7 billion pre-tax charge in fiscal 2012 as a result of the restructuring, along with another $1.8 billion through 2014. However, the company says the new plan will generate annualized savings in the range of $3 to $3.5 billion (after 2014) and hopes the new plan will simplify business processes, boost innovation and deliver better results for employees, customers and shareholders. Approximately 27,000 employees will leave the company between now and the end of 2014. The restructuring plan will involve cash-saving reductions in other areas, including supply chain optimization and SKU and platform rationalization.

"These initiatives build upon our recent organizational realignment, and will further streamline our operations, improve our processes, and remove complexity from our business," Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, said in a prepared statement. "While some of these actions are difficult because they involve the loss of jobs, they are necessary to improve execution and to fund the long term health of the company. We are setting HP on a path to extend our global leadership and deliver the greatest value to customers and shareholders." 

So, with all those savings, HP's got some money to spend. What's it going to do with all that cash? Reinvest, mostly. The company plans to spread the money across all of its departments, providing extra dough for R&D for its Services, Software, and Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking divisions.

Today's restructuring initiative is part of newly-appointed CEO Meg Whitman's overall plan to return the Silicon Valley company back into positive growth. PC sales are reportedly dropping due to consumer favoritism towards tablets. The company has also been slow to shift away from ITservices and focus on the current trend of cloud computing.