The 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.
