back to article HPE core servers and storage under pressure

Analysis HPE's latest results show a company emerging slimmer and fitter through diet (cost-cutting) and exercise (spin-merger deals) but facing tougher markets in servers and storage – the new normal, as CEO Meg Whitman says. A look at the numbers and the earnings call from the servers and storage points of view shows a …

  1. Erik4872

    What to do with $5B?

    The funny thing is that "old HP" just got done unmerging its businesses and writing down a couple of failed acquisitions (Autonomy) and ventures (Helion public cloud.) I say the best way to use that money would be to save it and use it to shore up their core product lines rather than going out and buying yet another flash memory array startup.

    There are still more than a few customers (us included) that need solid, reliable on-premises medium size servers. HPE still fills this role nicely for us. If they can continue this rather than chasing money in the public cloud that eventually won't go to them, medium organizations like ours will keep paying. Public cloud providers are just going to go to Foxconn with the Open Compute spec in hand and ask for 5 million white box servers, and that makes sense in the cloud environment, since you don't actually care deeply whether the hardware is healthy. HPE's new core market is medium sized and large businesses who can't outsource to the public cloud. Small businesses are lost, because the public cloud will eventually win out. Large businesses will probably roll out their own private clouds on vendor hardware because they don't want to spend money maintaining things -- they'll just use it through the warranty period and repeat.

    It's just like what's happening in the PC industry. Solid, high-margin, well built PCs and laptops/convertibles are doing fine. Companies still need them. What people don't need is the sub-$300 zero-margin, poor quality home computers that the low end of the market puts out. The consolidation in the PC market is a result of the product teams, marketing teams, etc. of the low end being removed. Lenovo is doing fine with its workstations and ThinkPads. HP actually has a few decent laptops out these days. And Dell, with the shackles of the stock market removed, is also improving. You just don't see this stuff showing up at Best Buy the same way it used to.

    1. Nate Amsden

      Re: What to do with $5B?

      as a long time HP customer I agree(and I tried going the white box route for a couple years only to learn the hard way and came back to HP), they do a lot of stupid things. Though it seems like many (most?) companies are doing stupid things recently when it comes to wanting to show some kind of growth. If you are not showing growth then you might as well be dead in the eyes of many stock holders, even if it might take you a decade or two to actually "die".

      Which is of course one of the big reasons Dell went private.

      The next full recession whenever it hits (I thought it would of really hit 2-3 years ago, some people argue we have been in one the whole time and I partially agree with that but think there is significant pain on the horizon) will be interesting to see what happens across the various industries.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: What to do with $5B?

        Well, as the CEO of Siemens said during the 2008 Financial Failure, if people tried to to do a little less financial re-engineering, and a little more real engineering, they'd be a lot better off.

        Meanwhile enterprise IT infrastructure?

        - Dell privatizes then merges with EMC

        - HP splits in two

        - the HPE spins off services than software .....

        - Lenovo buys IBM's X86 server and storage business

        I'd say there's a clear focus on financial re-engineering to cover the absence of any real engineering, e.g. HPE truly a sad laggard in HCI.

    2. G Olson

      Re: What to do with $5B?

      As a 3PAR owner before and after the acquisition, I plead with HPE not to buy yet another promising company and drive the operation into oblivion with your bureaucracy and politics and crappy service department which is full of script dummies. Having to use second best kit to avoid the possibility of an HPE acquisition is disheartening.

  2. fredesmite

    There is a reason HP removed the "INVENT logo

    Because they don't invent anything ... they rebrand the same shitte mass produced by FoxxConn sweat shops in China used by everyone else.

  3. CptCodFish

    HPE's new storage...

    ... All flash VM aware Tintri...?

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