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.