Search Results for: meg whitman

Meg Whitman describes HP’s amicable divorce

Posted on October 7, 2015 by - News

Meg Whitman, photo by Mike MageeMeg Whitman was quizzed by the audience at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, today.

She said that the reason for splitting the company was to be more focused. She said it was remarkably complex on all fronts whether it was the IT or the supply chains HP used.

On August 1st HP started operating as two separate companies she said, and on November 2nd there will be two separate Fortune 50 companies.

She believes that HP will demonstrate the success of the separation. The two companies will be called HP Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She said HP wanted to avoid inventing a new brand name and wanted both companies to be linked to the HP heritage.

HPE will have a green rectangular logo. HPE will include HP financial services. On November the 2nd, both companies will probably still be in the same buildings. She said that there’s a joint venture between HP Inc and HPE to work together on the supply chain to leverage the size.

Whitman said the biggest challenge was the IT separation. She said the company had to change emails, URLs, servers, and the rest. She said HPE will be a much faster and agile company but one thing that won’t change is partner focus. “Channel is in our DNA,” she said.

Whitman said she has rooted out the “nay sayers” in the company. She said the separation means both companies will have something of a rebirth. Everyone in both companies is going to be “fully engaged”.

She said HP has increased R&D spending every year for the last four years. She said in a software defined world infrastructure matters more than ever. She thinks configuration of infrastructure to apps will be an important part of HPE’s strategy.

Software is only seven percent of revenue but HPE is about providing answers for the new type of IT.

She said that the slimming down of headcount in the services business recenrly was intended to make that business unit leaner and meaner and HPE expected revenues in that sector to grow.

She said the Safe Harbour provision that the EU court ruled was invalid yesterday wouldn’t affect the two companies too much, because data was generally held locally. There may be changes but she believed HP set that process going four years ago.

One question from the audience that was asked, but wasn’t aired,  was whether Whitman would vote for Winsome Carly Fiorina as president of the USA.

Whitman starts cleaning out her desk

Posted on November 22, 2017 by - News

Meg WhitmanHPE’s Whitman announced she is quitting as the CEO and claims that her channel track record was a critical aspect of her six year reign.

On 1 February 2018, Whitman will be replaced by the current president Antonio Neri, who joined HP in 1995 as a customer service engineer in the EMEA call centre.

Shareholders were not happy – HPE’s shares were down by nearly eight percent in after-hours trading, despite Q4 results topping expectations.

Whitman was appointed as HP CEO in September 2011 following the departure of much-maligned predecessor Leo Apotheker and quickly implemented a five-year turnaround.

She hived off the printer and PC arm of HP in 2015, and put in motion the most significant corporate divorce in history.

HPE’s headcount is now standing at less than 50,000, compared with nearly 350,000 when she joined.

In the UK she was known for dropping in on top HP resellers, including Softcat and CDW in the UK for tea and biscuits and talk up HP and HPE’s channel-friendly credentials at its partner summits.

According to HPE’s statement today, the vendor improved customer and partner satisfaction under her leadership, as well as rebuilding its balance sheet, strengthening operations and reigniting innovation.

HPE has delivered a shareholder return of 89 percent – three times that of the S&P 500 – HPE pointed out.

“I’m incredibly proud of all we’ve accomplished since I joined HP in 2011”, Whitman said.

“Today, Hewlett Packard moves forward as four industry-leading companies that are each well positioned to win in their respective markets. Now is the right time for Antonio and a new generation of leaders to take the reins of HPE. I have tremendous confidence that they will continue to build a great company that will thrive well into the future.”

HPE’s Q4 revenue rose five percent year on year to $7.8 billion, the company also announced.

Whitman will remain on the HPE board of directors.

 

 

HPE’s Meg predicted to leave by Yule

Posted on August 31, 2017 by - News

meg-whitmanThe news that HPE boss Meg Whitman was in the running for the Uber CEO job has led to some industry types to claim that she will be out of her HPE job by Yuletide.

Whitman, who has been HPE CEO since 2011, had been linked with the top job at Uber, but in July she publicly denied she would be moving to the ride-sharing firm.  She did not get the job that went to Dara Khosrowshahi – formally CEO at online travel firm Expedia.

However, Whitman gave media interviews this week and said Uber’s board approached her again over the weekend.

Uber had asked what it would take for her to change her mind

“I was not a contender for this job until the weekend — and I’m not even sure I was then”,  an apparently confused Whitman said.

However analysts are surprised by all this particularly as HPE is not doing that well and is going through one of its many restructurings. It cannot be seen as a good thing to learn that your CEO is planning to clean out her office and exit the building.

Most of the hacks covering the story think that Whitman will have gone by the end of the year.

HP’s Whitman brings cheers to its channel

Posted on February 19, 2013 by - Gossip, News

Meg Whitman, photo by Mike MageeMeg Whitman, president and CEO of HP opened up her keynoting at the global partner event here in Las Vegas by stressing the importance of the channel. “I love the channel,” she said. “You are a huge part of our success and a huge part of our future.  “I want to provide an update to HP’s strategy and growth, demonstrate our commitment to the channel and to make it more profitable for the channel to do business with Hewlett Packard.”

“The last couple of years at Hewlett Packard haven’t been easy,” she said. But HP is turning itself round. “We know what needs to get done and we’re doing it.”  Last year she laid out a four year plan for Hewlett Packard. “My management team needed to come together with a realistic view of what we needed to do and what we needed to change.”

2014 will mean a recovery and the basis for future expansion, she said. “You won’t have to wait until 2015 to see progress. You will see the results this year. In 2013 we are on a very strong financial footing. Last year HP generated $10.6 billion of cash flow from operations. That’s more operating cash flow than Coca Cola, Disney and Fedex. A company with $10.6 billion in cash flow is a force to be reckoned wth.”

One of the biggest problems HP has had in the last few years has been churn in top management, she admitted.  HP has taken some of its old HR systems and revised them. Last year HP invested more in R&D, it launched a new advertising campain, and revised its entire communications and PR strategy.  HP has put an increased focus on the channel, she said.  HP created a party advisory board and surveyed 6,000 channel partners.

That showed HP was too complex to do business with, there are too mny complicated programmes and HP’s tools and processes were hard to navigate, Whitman said. It has implemented a single channel programme.  HP now has a very clear policy about taking business away from the channel and going direct. “This will simply not be tolerated,” she said, raising heavy applause from the channel audience.

“Partners are part of the DNA of Hewlett Packard and are an essential part of our future,” she said.  HP will make it simpler and more consistent to do business with its partners and strengthen trust and loyalty. HP has simplified the management of the channel and will work hand in hand in business growth.  “A fast no is far better than a slow no. A long yes isn’t satisfying either,” she said.

HP will rationalise sales and technical specifications and will simplify the support profile. There will be one partner programme across the whole of HP, she reiterated. HP will implement a simple compensation model generating rebates from the first sale. It will also remove caps and allow an unlimited pay out.  It will put more focus on making its compensation structure clear. There will be a new HP tool to simplify channel business. HP Financial Services will also chip in on the channel front.

She said that HP has a number of products so popular that there is a shortage, such as its storage portfolio and its Elite tablet, aimed at the enterprise market. She said that the leadership across the channel business had the power to do their best now. HP has kept its best and brightest executives but has brought in some new members of the management team.

Hybrid services pays off for HPE

Posted on August 30, 2018 by - News

banner_220x220The former maker of expensive printer ink, HPE, is doing rather well on the back of its shiny new hybrid services cunning plan which is channel dependent.

With its PointnextHPE services business, the vendor has stated an ambition to make it an area that delivers revenue through the channel.

The plan, which emerged in March last year, was to give the channel the services support that they can scale to meet customer needs, with a large amount of flexibility built into the offering.

Pointnext was supposed to give users the support needed to accelerate their digital transformation.  It rolled out Greenlake Flex Capacity, which was designed to make life easier for partners with pre-packaged options that would speed up quote times.

HPE also made a couple of acquisitions, with RedPixie this April and Cloud Technology Partners last September, to add more support for those customers looking at moving to the cloud.

During the outfit’s third-quarter announcement CEO Antonio Neri said that Pointext delivered a  per cent decline in revenue year-on-year, although orders grew by four per cent.

“We continue to strengthen our HPE Pointnext services business, and we see significant opportunity as we execute our services-led go-to-market strategy”, he said.

The firm is looking to put the focus of the services business on the most profitable areas and in that space, revenue increased by one percent in Q3 and orders improved by eight per cent.

“This growth is largely due to the strong improvement of services intensity as we shift our focus in more value-added offerings, high-growth in HPE GreenLake and some larger deals. Advisory and professional services revenue was down 10 per cent, largely due to our intentional exit of more than 40 companies as part of our HPE Next plan,” said Neri.

He signalled that the current focus was on hybrid cloud solutions and it had been investing in that area.

“Overall, our Hybrid IT portfolio of products and services is stronger than it has ever been, and continues to help our customers manage and simplify their IT in a hybrid world,” he said.

HPE reported a fairly flat quarter revenue wise with Q3 turnover up just a per cent year-on-year to $7.8 billion. The vendor also continues to deliver on Meg Whitman’s last big plan before she stepped down, the Next initiative, which is right-sizing the business for the future.

HPE quits Palo Alto

Posted on November 6, 2017 by - News

bd_stone_1989In what is an end of an era, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will save a bit of cash by leaving its Palo Alto headquarters and moving to nearby Santa Clara.

The predecessor HP company was based in Palo Alto from its founding in 1939 until it was split in two in 2015. HP is still based in the city.

In a press release, HPE said that the company no longer needs a facility of the current size and will look to sell the property – splitting employees between three other facilities.

The move comes as HPE continues its radical $1.5bn cost-saving measures that will see thousands of employees laid off, as well as the reported closure of a facility in Roseville, California.

The Aruba offices in Santa Clara will become HPE’s new global headquarters, while other employees will be split between facilities in San Jose and Milpitas.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman said: “Over the past two years we’ve made tremendous progress towards becoming a simpler, nimbler and more focused company.

“I’m excited to move our headquarters to an innovative new building that provides a next-generation digital experience for our employees, customers and partners.

“Our new building will better reflect who HPE is today and where we are heading in the future.”

HPE said it will continue to support the HP garage – the garage where Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard formed HP, now a museum – and the HP Founder’s Office, which served as HP’s headquarters until 1981.

HPE shifts away from lower margins

Posted on October 20, 2017 by - News

HPEHPE has outlined its plans for its full year 2018, indicating that it will shift its focus away from lower margin business and focus more on high margin solutions and services.

HPE’s lower margin business – particularly its tier one server business – has been blamed for hampering growth.

HPE said it expects to record revenue growth of five percent, but this prediction takes the tier one business out of the equation.

For its full year 2018, HPE said it expects to report “modest” revenue growth, again discounting the troubled tier-one server business.

Speaking at an analysts meeting, HPE CEO Meg Whitman outlined the five-year turnaround plan HPE is in the middle off, insisting that splitting the company into HPE and HP Inc was the right decision.

“I can tell you without a doubt separating the company in two was absolutely the right thing to do for our customers, our partners, our employees and of course our investors. We’ve seen that in the financial markets reactions.

“In 2012 we embarked on a five-year journey to turn this company around and create better value for shareholders, customers and partners.

“The first step was to diagnose the problems and build a solid foundation for a turnaround. 2013 was all about fixing and rebuilding the business. We improved operations, drove better cash flow and repaired our balance sheet

“In FY14 we focused on recover and expansion. We stabilised our revenue trajectory, we reignited innovation across HP and further strengthened our leadership in key areas. Fy15 was about accelerating that progress. We continued to target investments in higher-margin areas and saw the opportunity to accelerate our business in key acquisitions like Aruba.”

Whitman said that HPE is in the process of strengthening through four key factors: Organic investment, in areas such as HPE Synergy; investment in partnerships; acquisitions of the likes of Nimble and SimpliVity; and portfolio optimisation, which saw its services and software business spun out into separate organisations.

“Our partner ecosystem is the best in the industry and absolutely critical to our future. Partnerships our going to be critical and that’s why we launched Pathfinder, our venture investment and partnership programme. We use our expertise to identify the best emerging start-ups and then we curate their innovation within our innovation which helps us deliver cutting-edge solutions to our customers with results they cannot find anywhere else.”

HP is making inroads into 3D printing

Posted on October 19, 2017 by - News

o-OFFICE-3D-PRINTER-facebookA while back HP promised that it would take the lead in 3D printing and it is starting to look like it is making good on that promise.

Vendor snuck into fifth place in industrial 3D printer market in Q2, four years after Meg Whitman declared that HP intended to lead the market. To be fair though HP has only had products in the 3D printer market for a year and to get to the top five from no-where is some feat.

With its Jet Fusion line up, HP sold $13.5 million of industrial 3D printer hardware in the second quarter of 2017.

According to beancounters at Context HP took a four percent share of the industrial segment of the market in Q2, behind names that will be less familiar to the channel, namely market leader Stratasys, EOS, GE Additive and 3D Systems.

HP began “pushing strongly” into the channel in the first half of the year, “setting itself up for further growth later this year and beyond”, Context said.

The industrial sub-segment Jet Fusion plays in has experienced mixed fortunes since then, with unit shipments declining in both 2015 and 2016.

Context predicts that the industrial sector will return to growth in 2017, partly thanks to the fresh blood that has entered the market.

Polymer machines continued to dominate the market in Q2, accounting for 90 per cent of the unit volume sales and 61 percent of the printer revenues, Context said.

While HP’s machines are initially focused on polymers, GE Additive – which is another new entrant to the top five – focuses on metal 3D printing.

Context vice president of global analysis Chris Connery said that there was a four per cent decline in the number of industrial/professional 3D printers shipped in the second quarter of this year compared to the earlier year, but the average selling price of these machines continued to climb.

“It now seems that both these trends will change in the second half of 2017. Average selling prices are set to drop with the shipment of new category of lower priced metal-printing machines helping to promote new growth.

“For polymer 3D printing, growth is expected from select technologies as this side of the market continues to penetrate into the manufacturing market and away from just prototyping.”

 

 

HPE to decimate staff again

Posted on September 25, 2017 by - News

legionnaires Hewlett Packard Enterprise is planning to cut 5,000 jobs or 10 percent of its workforce, as part of its HPE Next restructuring initiative.

HPE has already begun notifying executives impacted by the restructuring, with the company announcing this week the new management teams within each of the 11 regions.

HPE is officially not saying anything about the moves. The company has been restructuring for years no and it is surprising that there are still staff to decimate.

The HPE Next initiative is aimed at rearchitecting and simplifying the structure of the company with as much as $200 million to $300 million in cost savings in the current fiscal year. HPE is aiming for $1.5 billion in cost savings over a three-year period.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman told her unfortunate employees that the news of the restructuring was just media reports speculating about employee reductions.

“As you know, we have been aggressively moving forward with our HPE Next program, which is focused on positioning the company for the future. And, I can assure you that our employees are the heart of that strategy. We are looking at a variety of options as we think about the cost structure of the company, and they include both reductions and investments,” Whitman said in the memo.

However, Whitman said it is critical for the company to put “the right resources behind areas that will drive our profitable growth, while rebalancing our cost structure in others”.

Whitman said HPE is committed to “transparency” and will communicate decisions as soon as they are made.

As part of the next restructuring, HPE has already announced that it is flattening its channel organization eliminating layers of management by combining its channels and alliances groups under a single organization headed by Global Channel Chief Denzil Samuels.

The restructuring also includes a new North America management team led by North America Sales Chief Dan Belanger, CRN reported Friday.

Among the top channel executives leaving HPE as a result of the restructuring are Scott Dunsire, an 11-year HPE veteran widely credited with making broad channel improvements and improving co-selling engagement between partners and the HPE direct sales force and Mike Parrottino, a 30-year HPE veteran who was a passionate advocate for partners and the SMB route to market.
Both Dunsire and Parrottino dramatically increased the percentage of sales going through the channel, initiating a mandate to drive 100 percent of SMB sales through partners.

Brexit turns UK into HPE’s backwater

Posted on September 8, 2017 by - News

1046922917HPE CEO Meg Whitman would rather have preferred that Brexit never happened.

Whatever some politicians might  talk about the benefits of leaving the EU, Whitman confirmed there had been a pause in demand in the UK market after the EU referendum.

“I think we are still feeling some after-effects from Brexit, because it’s not clear exactly how this is all going to work. So I would say, the UK market is a bit challenged for us”,  she said.

Public sector spending also being cut back “quite dramatically” and the UK has suddenly become one of HPE’s weaker markets.

Once it was a very important market, but now the rest of Western Europe, the US, Canada, Latin America and Asia were “all outperforming the UK right now”.

It looks like as far as HPE is concerned the UK, rather than growing more important as it asserted its independence from the EU is becoming an also ran behind such wonderful economies as Brazil, Venezuela and Burma. Maybe they should have put that on the Brexit campaign bus.

White box servers are bucking the industry trend

Posted on August 9, 2017 by - News

9100-w_cube-favor-boxes476fe5f55ab9e9fbdd0d91e1da43bb0aWhile the server market is in the doledrums, white box servers are doing really well, according to beancounters at IDC.

The white box server market is growing and the IDC numbers from IDC merely serve to reinforce the point, with the revelation that the ODM Direct group of vendors grew revenue by 41.8 percent in the first quarter to $1.2 billion, accounting for 10.4 percent of the market, at a time when overall server revenues declined by 4.6 percent.

Gartner research director Adrian O’Connell found something similar – while there was a global decline of 4.5 percent in server revenues in the same period, revenues in the “others” category rose 4.4 percent. He wrote that leading server vendors are doing all they can to ensure that service providers don’t continue to shift their server purchases toward ODM suppliers.

“Combined with the significant inroads made by China-based suppliers, we expect to see continuing challenges and downward price pressure across the EMEA server market for some time to come,” he said.

HPE struck a deal with Foxconn to sell white box-like servers to cloud and telco providers three years ago. But CEO Meg Whitman recently admitted that server sales had been affected by declining orders from a single customer – probably Microsoft.

Supermicro is one of the key white box venders. In February, it was believed that Chipzilla was the unnamed customer in a deal for more than 30,000 Supermicro servers for a data centre in Silicon Valley.

HPE blames Brits for poor performance

Posted on June 2, 2017 by - News

article-2521076-19FD5A3C00000578-456_634x423Hewlett Packard Enterprise has singled out the UK for its weak performance in Europe after its revenue dropped in the second quarter.

HPE reported a global revenue of $7.4 billion, down 13 percent on the same period last year.

HPE CFO Tim Stonesifer said the UK was chiefly to blame for difficulties in Europe.

“Revenue in Europe continue to be weak, driven by the UK, although strong results in Germany helped the region,” he said.

HPE suffered because of a mystery tier-one customer in its server business as a major contributor to the revenue drop, as it did when it published its first quarter results earlier this year.

CEO Meg Whitman said that if this customer is taken out of the equation, HPE would have actually reported a revenue increase of one per cent for second quarter.

Whitman said that the customer was a significant enough size to dramatically affect revenue over the coming months.

Forbes speculated that the customer could be one of the big public cloud providers Microsoft, Google, or Amazon Web Services.

HPE’s server revenue declined 14 percent year on year in the quarter to just under $3 billion, but taking the tier-one customer out of the equation brings the decline to just one percent.

HPE was one of a number of vendors to hike prices in the UK specifically after the EU Referendum.

The company was surprised that jacking up the price of their products harmed the bottom line so much. Who would have thought that raising prices in a time of uncertainty would not have made more money?

Because of the difficultly regarding pricing and commodities, HPE will look to make savings of between $200 million and $300 million in the second half of this year – as it integrates Nimble and SimpliVity and adjusts for life after the spin mergers of its software and services groups.

HPE said it was taking significant steps to optimise the cost structure of the future HPE. It is also looking to trim an incremental $200 million to $300 million in cost savings in just the second half of this year, HPE said.

These savings will be a combination of tight control over spending and simplifying the organisation through de-layering and spend-control actions as it becomes a smaller, more nimble company, HPE said.

 

HPE gets more Nimble

Posted on March 8, 2017 by - News

Funny-Surfing-22Hewlett Packard Enterprise has written a $1 billion in cash cheque to buy Nimble Storage which makes predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage systems.

HPE claims it will mean that it can offer a full range of flash storage systems for different customer bands. HPE’s hopes the move will see of rivals from Dell EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage.

IDC reckons the flash storage market topped reached $15 billion in 2016, and will grow to almost $20 billion by 2020 with nearly 17 percent compound annual growth rate.

Nimble’s flash systems are aimed at SMEs and HPE said the acquisition is complementary to its midrange to high-end 3PAR flash storage systems and its affordable MSA products.

Meg Whitman, HPE president and CEO, in a statement that Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens HPE’s 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help it deliver on its vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers.

“This acquisition is exactly aligned with the strategy and capital allocation approach we’ve laid out. We remain focused on high-growth and higher-margin segments of the market.”

HPE wants Nimble’s InfoSight Predictive Analytics platform to be used across its storage products portfolio. That technology helps IT managers detect and resolve IT infrastructure issues, reducing the amount of time spent on support activities.

Combining the HPE and Nimble product portfolios would allow customers to more easily move and replicate data across hybrid flash and all-flash storage to meet IT demands, more easily manage storage volumes and data compaction to reduce capacity costs, and integrate data protection capabilities with data encryption, replication and integration capabilities provided by third-party applications, Whiteman said.

Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager of HPE’s Enterprise Group wrote in the company’s bog that Nimble’s entry to midrange predictive flash storage solutions, coupled with InfoSight, its leading predictive analytics technology, will strengthen HPE’s flash storage portfolio by expanding market reach and enabling a transformed, analytics-based customer experience.

HPE spins and goes British

Posted on September 8, 2016 by - News

hp_enterprise_logoThe former maker of expensive printer ink HPE will spin off and merge its non-core software assets with Britain’s Micro Focus in a deal worth $8.8 billion.

The move is part of HPE Chief Executive Meg Whitman’s cunning plan to shift HPE’s strategy to a few key areas such as networking, storage and technology services since the company separated last year from computer and printer maker HP. It will also off-load the troubled software side of the business.

HPE acquired part of its software portfolio through the $10.3 billion purchase of Britain’s Autonomy in 2011. HP’s $11 billion purchase of Autonomy was supposed to form the central part of the US group’s move into software.

HP later wrote off three-quarters of the company’s value, accusing Autonomy executives of financial mismanagement.

Whitman said in a statement that HPE was taking another important step in achieving the vision of creating a faster-growing, higher-margin, stronger cash flow company well positioned for customers and for the future.

The deal with Micro Focus, a multinational software company based in Newbury was announced along with HPE’s latest quarterly earnings. In the third quarter, HPE reported net revenue of $12.2 billion, down 6 percent from $13.1 billion a year earlier.

The transaction is expected to be tax free to HP. Micro Focus will pay $2.5 billion in cash to HPE, while HPE shareholders will own 50.1 percent of the combined company that will operate under the name Micro Focus and be run by its executives. HP said it would pay $700 million in one-time costs related to the separation of the assets.

Other HPE assets that will be merged include software for application delivery management, big data, enterprise security, information management & governance and IT Operations management businesses.

Micro Focus has been bulking up on acquisitions to boost growth, and this would be its largest deal to date. Earlier this year, Micro Focus acquired U.S. firm Serena Software for $540 million.

Kevin Loosemore, executive chairman of Micro Focus, said that “the time is right for consolidation in the infrastructure software market and this proposed merger will create one of the leading players in this space.”

HPE is the latest firm looking to Britain for expansion opportunities after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Valuations of British companies have been relatively low given current exchange rates.

Dell mocks HPE’s composing efforts

Posted on December 3, 2015 by - News

Larry_Nickel_composing_in_2004HP Enterprises composing efforts were dubbed a minor effort which will soon b flat, by Dell.

HPE this week unveiled plans to release the new composable architecture early next year. It’s being called Synergy, and HPE CEO Meg Whitman claimed the product was revolutionary.

We were suspicious because it involved the non-word Synergy and the word composable which keeps getting underlined by our word processor as being made up.  Tech companies use the word synergy and made up words when they are describing a non-event and hope that managers will nod when they see the outfit is talking jargon.

Dell also slagged off HPE’s new “composable” Synergy architecture, saying the new infrastructure product is impractical, expensive and doomed to be one of the IT market’s “derelict big ideas”.

Writing in his Dell bog, Dell fellow Robert Hormuth attacked the idea of composable infrastructure and the fact that it is “being driven by a single company”.

Hormuth said punters don’t want their infrastructure composable. They want approaches that work across many vendors and many technologies.

“Organisations require solutions that are simple, inexpensive, agile and scalable over proprietary, monolithic and expensive,” he said.

He said that the HP idea was only supported by HP. It is not open so it lacks flexibility and choice. “We’re looking forward to the evolution of standards-based approaches for composable infrastructure – which will inevitably increase customer choices and leverage expertise by controlling cost. After all, the marketplace is littered with derelict big ideas that were pushed by a single enterprise technology vendor. Right now, composable infrastructure could be one of those big ideas.”

Hormuth, in his blog post, touted Dell’s Active System Manager architecture as more practical, affordable and flexible than composable infrastructure.

HPE Vice President Paul Miller told  CRN, “If you don’t have a composable infrastructure yet, then of course it is not practical for you to sell one. What is not practical about having a system that gives you fluid pools of compute, storage and fabric, that enables you to stand up infrastructure for a workload in three minutes or less?”

The new HPE architecture is being billed as the first ever designed to bridge traditional and cloud-native applications into fluid resource pools that can be deployed at “cloud speed.” That could eliminate the big advantage that Amazon Web Services has had over internal IT departments that have struggled to provision workloads instantly like AWS can.