Hewlett-Packard, HP, the iconic company often credited with laying the foundation for Silicon Valley and, with it, an unprecedented burst of technological creativity, attempts to reinvent itself beginning today as HPE, or Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
As with many technology giants currently struggling to evolve, HP moved last year to transform itself by announcing it would split itself in two: HP Enterprise includes the company’s server, cloud computing and other “enterprise” units while HP Inc. includes PCs and printers, the latter carrying the company for much of the last decade.
HP Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) debuts today (Nov. 2) with a little north of $50 billion in annual revenue and what CEO Meg Whitman hopes is a strategy to compete in an increasingly cut-throat enterprise technology market. Whitman’s plan entails competing head-to-head on cloud and datacenter infrastructure while growing its IT security and big data units that are gradually being folded into a range of enterprise offerings.
The company also hopes to transfer the expertise it developed in dividing itself in two to offer “workplace productivity” products. Cloud networking also is emerging as a possible revenue generator.
In announcing its plan late last year for “doubling down on infrastructure,” Whitman stressed that the enterprise company would serve as the focal point for HP’s infrastructure push centering on converged IT, servers, storage, software-defined networking, and a Helion cloud offering built on OpenStack.
The Helion cloud computing initiative was initially positioned as a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ:AMZN), but HP announced last month it would shut down its Helion Public Cloud early next year. Instead, HP said it would recalibrate its cloud strategy to focus on private clouds running on HP servers while helping cloud customers run their software on AWS, Microsoft Azure and other public clouds.
HP executives said last month they had decided to pull the plug on Helion cloud because public clouds were no longer a “core area” for the HP Enterprise. Public cloud services are also among the most cutthroat of enterprise sectors, with public cloud leaders AWS, Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) engaged in constant price wars.
Observers note that the move away from public cloud offerings plays to HP Enterprise’s strengths as a hardware vendor and provider of managed IT services. Indeed, Whitman told the New York Times over the weekend that the company sells “a server every six seconds. We had to keep selling them.”
Read full article at HPCwire‘s sister publication, EnterpriseTech.