Tag: HPE

HPE 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.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise President Antonio Neri has told the world+dog that it is ready to ship its Nimble InfoSight predictive analytics offering on its high-end 3Par storage line.

It should be ready for partners within 90 days and give bring the cloud-based predictive analytics platform to 3Par. HPE is hoping that the move, which comes just months after closing the Nimble acquisition will shake up the storage market.

It will be the first time a major storage vendor will be able to predict storage failures and “proactively resolve them” across an end-to-end portfolio that spans the market from small/medium businesses to the enterprise.

InfoSight was the “crown jewels” of HPE’s $1 billion acquisition of Nimble, Neri said. The AI power of the platform provides HPE and its partners with a big competitive advantage against any and all competitors.

He added that it was proof HPE was delivering its strategy to make hybrid IT simple.

“The first thing partners are going to see is a consistent experience across Nimble and 3Par with AI, predictive analytics, and predictive maintenance across the entire storage footprint – all attached to our HPE Pointnext”, Neri said.

 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.

HPE has confirmed it will merge its recent acquisitions’ channel initiatives into its own Partner Ready Programme on 1 November.

Over the last year HPE has been buying like a mad thing, and snapped up Simplivity, Nimble Storage, SGI, Cloud Cruiser and Niara. These outfits conducted the majority of their business through the channel prior to acquisition and HPE said that the goal was to get them all working under the Partner Ready Programme.

Speaking to the assorted throngs at HPE’s Global Partner Summit yesterday, Jesse Chavez, VP of worldwide channel strategy and operations, said by 1 November Nimble, Cloud Cruiser and Simplivity will be fully migrated to the HPE Partner Ready Program.

Niara and SGI have already nearly moved to Partner Ready. Niara will be available on Partner Ready from August, while SGI is already underway, with products starting to appear in July.

Chavez said that SGI was a special case as it did not do much of its business through the channel. Other acquisitions did all their business through the channel, he said, SGI’s rate only managed about a fifth. It was something that HPE wanted to change.

There will also be no room for parallel partner programmes with these new acquisitions, which contrasts with the company’s strategy when it bought Aruba Networks two years ago.