Not sure if he can do any worse.
HPE CEO Meg Whitman QUITS, MAN! Neri to replace chief exec in Feb
Hewlett Packard Enterprise boss Meg Whitman is stepping down, and will be replaced on February 1 by company president Antonio Neri. Neri, a 50-year-old engineer turned executive who we described as a CEO-in-waiting, will take the chief exec throne while remaining HPE president. As of right now, the US tech goliath's stock is …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 21st November 2017 21:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Proud?
“I’m incredibly proud of all we’ve accomplished since I joined HP in 2011."
Proud of what?
Destroying the careers and lives of thousands of loyal and dedicated workers?
Destroying the good name, quality and reputation of a company that was held in high esteem for close on 100 years?
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 00:48 GMT Mpeler
Re: Proud?
Scott McNealy would probably say "you can hear the sound of a garbage truck crashing into the night"...
Goodbye, and good riddance, Meg, or should I say Nit Whitman. I though Leo, Carly, and the flailing Hurd were the worst that could happen to HP.
You've eclipsed them all. And made a mockery of Bill and Dave and the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of creative, dedicated, and hard-working employees that have walked the floors of HP.
You aren't even worthy to sweep them.
Just. Go. Away.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 09:48 GMT ToddRundgrensUtopia
Re: Proud?
I think Jonathan Swartz was mainly responsible for destroying Sun. McNeally took it from technical workstation and file server player to enterprise darling when he bought CS64 from Cray, (as it was being bought be SGI) and renamed it the Enterprise 10,000. eBay were one of the early adopters on a grand scale
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Thursday 23rd November 2017 00:33 GMT PaulCharlton
Re: It's sad what HP has become...
@ Marketing Hack
Which is why you'll not find Wall St. criticizing any of her moves or motives. It has also been a boondoggle for many execs through retention bonuses ..... which was precisely the motivation for Compaq selling itself to HP in the first place.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 04:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Whitman did the right thing
HP with over 300,000 employees was simply too large a company to steer and needed to be broken apart. When that happens it's unavoidable that good people will lose their jobs. This is not the first time nor the last time a company will layoff employees or spin off/sell off parts of its business.
In a couple of years Whitman transitioned the company from 244,000 to less than 50,000 by spinning off, and selling off businesses most of which were awful acquisitions made by her predecessors! I don't think anyone would argue with that.
In the mean time, lets not forget that is a publicly traded company with shareholders that expect top and bottom line growth which means they have to keep selling. On top of all that they made 6 acquisitions. Yes 6!
Folks, all these things combined represent a monumental task that not only affects a company's culture and but also its systems and processes. It's like riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling clubs!
One can say a lot of things about Whitman, you can call her a lot of names but she is very very smart and ultimately she did the right thing by breaking up the company. She also returned $18bln from 2015 to 2017 to investors! Do you think Wall Street doesn't like her? You're a dead wrong!
Lastly a profitable company with close to 30bln revenue, 7bln in cash, practically zero short term debt is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Companies of this size tend to go thru peaks and valleys but more often than not they navigate thru their challenges. I expect HPE to come thru. It's a much better company that it has been given credit for although I admit the bandwagon effect can be irresistible at times.
Regards
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 07:52 GMT TrumpSlurp the Troll
Re: Whitman did the right thing
So you are saying that all the previous CEOs did the wrong thing in a long string of takeovers?
For example they borged EDS then proceeded to dismember it and lay off staff.
Looks like most of the remains have been ditched by now. Making it seem a positive thing to downsize after a decade or more of bungled take overs is disingenuous.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 08:06 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: Whitman did the right thing
Looks like most of the remains have been ditched by now. Making it seem a positive thing to downsize after a decade or more of bungled take overs is disingenuous.
Sorta. Most of the takeovers should have never happened. HP of old failed to correctly integrate every single takeover I can remember all the way back to the DEC/Compaq merger.
While there is nothing positive in admitting that these have failed and trying to clean up house, it had to be done. It was predetermined on the date her predecessors took over all of those previous failed acquisitions.
It will be predetermined in any future acquisitions too, because all large acquisitions are determined by beancounters and marketing, NOT engineering nowdays. Any synergies are determined as "synergies" - cost savings by beancounters.
There is no real analysis of how it relates to products on both sides and what does it change for real in the way the company does business. There is no engineering plan BEFORE the acquisition commences. It is done as an afterthought, very late in the M&A process or long after that.
Disclaimer - I have done M&A due diligence for more than one Tier 1 Silicon Valley company. I did not see an in-depth "engineering change" analysis even once. At all. It was all "what do we get from buying this sh**", not "how does buying this change OUR way of building sh**".
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 09:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Whitman did the right thing
>"HP with over 300,000 employees was simply too large a company to steer and needed to be broken apart."
Ah. Manglement at work. "I can't do the job i'm paid to do, so i'm going to sack literially around a hundred thousand people. Still can't manage to do what i'm being paid several hundred times more than most of my staff to do. How about splitting the remainder of the company in two?"
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Thursday 23rd November 2017 00:48 GMT PaulCharlton
Re: Whitman did the right thing
@ Voland's right hand
I'm guessing you are a Dec-ite. The "DEC/Compaq merger" as you describe was Compaq acquiring DEC. And yes, it was bogged up. Compaq bought DEC for its Tech Support and didn't want the rest of the business. But because Pfeiffer and Mason so mismanaged the acquisition, got greedy with Alta Vista and started cherry-picking bits they couldn't resist, nearly all of Digital was integrated into Compaq quite by accident.
Part of the problem with HP/Compaq was that there was so much focus on the current business (PC, printers, ink, X86 servers, HDDs, memory, etc) that acquisitions really weren't allowed to thrive. There was more or less only one GTM mechanism, one channel structure, one sales force organization, one sales compensation scheme. Even organic new businesses were typically suffocated at birth. "Building sh**" was never the the issue: focusing on selling it was.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 15:51 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Whitman did the right thing
If you don't like capitalism then become a communist and see where that gets you. I prefer to buy the shares and take the money. It's the real world, I too wish it was fair.
Now that's a classic 'eat cake' line....
Things didn't work out so well the last time it was used...
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 10:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Whitman did the right thing
Come off it. If I remember correctly, she was on the board when they bought Autonomy, and what a wonderful decision that was. She kept saying so.
Don't forget the time she bought Skype
Anyway, looks like she'll be running for POTUS.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 10:11 GMT deconstructionist
Re: Whitman did the right thing
Utterly vapid, downsizing broken structures or splitting those problems in to diverse units does not fix the internal issues crippling the company in the first place , I think the term you looking for is smoke and mirrors.
Wall street liked Donald trump ...your point was.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 11:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Whitman did the right thing
You kidding me right? Please tell me, you are kidding me. Returns to shareholders should be the last thing on any CEO's mind. Building excellent products and services and selling them well, by nurturing and motivating your employees is the only thing a CEO can or should do. Money will inevitably follow. Wrecking a company, destroying it's soul to extract short-term money for shareholders might work for a while but only for so long. No wonder 'her work' is finished. Don't mistake extraction for success. Irony is, she lives and collects her dosh for another day under the sun. Nit Whitman, Mark Turd, Shitty Rometty...the list is long indeed !!
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 23:09 GMT mtuber
Re: Whitman did the right thing
Really? Return to shareholders means nothing? Go tell that to Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, NetApp, Checpoint SW, Intel, Intuit and many more
When you've saturated the market and you've become opportunity bound like most large organizations are you become what the market calls a "value" player (vs a growth), then some very large shareholders will squeeze you for additional returns in terms of dividents and/or stock buybacks. The alternative would be some large fund manager(s) trying to oust you or force you to sell the company or break it up or all of the above. THAT is a much larger distraction.
So yes, CEOs do give a sh** about shareholders, very much so.
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Thursday 4th January 2018 16:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Whitman did the right thing
What a load of bull shit!!!!
I work in what used to be Enterprise Services. Everything, absolutely everything this corrupt hag did was only to pump the stock price in the short term. In the process she crippled all divisions. What remains in all HP, HPE and now DXC is just a husk, where employees are barely able to keep up. Services are mediocre at best because entire teams disappeared in days, and this happened several times in the course of several years.
"Folks, all these things combined represent a monumental task that not only affects a company's culture and but also its systems and processes. It's like riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling clubs!". You know, there are several bridges here in Costa Rica I can offer you for a bargain LOL.
She only spilled numbers like a trained monkey. I'm a primary witness of the fact. The numbers came from the higher ups and we were expected to "find the people" to layoff. At a time when we had 5 reqs open we were forced to lay off an even bigger number of good employees. Did that mean that we didn't need all that people? No, they were needed and the remained employees suffered because of that. But that type of movement is what made the books to look good in the short term.
Off course it is easier to just fire a random number of productive/revenue generating employees than just get rid of the moron in charge of counting cubicles to make sure everyone is complying with the stupid work from the office policy this stupid bitch dictated just to prove that she also has a dick.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 07:01 GMT Blotto
@James
The truth is that IBM & HP where research centres with retail arms selling stuff to fund the research.
Some ceo’s Saw the cheap option of ditching research to earn more profit in consulting as a good move and that’s where we are now, with innovation now coming from startups and web giants and no longer the traditional historic entities.
Good or bad that is where the deep think minds where that could design computers to send a man to the moon or put a calculator in your pocket.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 09:36 GMT Anonymal coward
I wonder...
If there'll be the same sort of race to reception to remove her photo that happened when Fiorina left? I remember the one at Amen Corner, as it was only CEs that were allowed screwdrivers, SEs had to talk about stuff...
HP died at Fiorina's hands, the rest have been simply steering the corpse to where the bean-counters can extract the most.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 12:13 GMT allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
"I've said for many years that the next leader of HPE should come from within the company, and Antonio is exactly the type of leader I had in mind," Whitman told financial analysts on a conference call today, adding that the board of directors had approved the handover of power."
Interesting. I've said for many years that the next leader of HPE should be someone with a fucking clue.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 13:10 GMT Salestard
It's not where you come from...
...it's where you're at. (long forgotten hip-hop reference. De La Soul perhaps?)
Chucking legions of employees under the bus in the name of savings is one thing. Jettisoning bits of the business to save weight and stop it taking on water is another. Neither, however, amount to anything if the net result is a dysfunctional, confused, badly led collection of remnants trying to capture long gone glory.
How lost is HPE? Well put it this way - I had some compulsory HPE product training over the last couple of months. As with other makers of flashylightboxes, this involves sitting in a large room whilst unnervingly enthusiastic company face tells you all the good bits about said box and maker of boxes. From storage to switches to software, these days it mostly focuses on business and technical outcomes that simple salespeople minds can cope with.
Not HPE though... oh no, that'd be too easy. Hours, and I mean hours, of bloody processor speeds on their ProLiants. Because I'm absolutely going to sit in front of a CTO and talk about how HPE are awesome because Gen10. The thought struck me that this training had moved on not one jot since the first load of training I had back when dual 750mhz in your Compaq ProLiant was considered Billy Bigboy shit reserved for the old banking IT mega teams.
The Life on Mars training could be forgiven if HPE could get their collective act together long enough to allow partners to sell something / customers to buy something. I've got a customer wanting a SAN at the moment - all the usual suspects engaged, yet weeks later still waiting on the call from the HPE storage specialist. No interest or enthusiasm at HPE = no interest or enthusiasm in the channel = end users never even considering HPE.
What Meg and plenty of other CEOs never quite seem to grasp is that if people aren't buying your stuff, everything else you try is just muzak.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 17:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Meg has an interesting view of recent HP history...
“I’m incredibly proud of all we’ve accomplished since I joined HP in 2011. Today, Hewlett Packard moves forward as four industry-leading companies that are each well positioned to win in their respective markets,”
Problem is Meg that splitting up the company wasn't part of the original plan, was it? Back in 2011 (some of us still remember) you promised a five year plan to turnaround HP and have HP (all of it) growing by FY2016.
Sometime in 2014 you realised the promised turnaround wasn't going to happen so you decided to split up the company, making all future pre and post merger comparisons impossible.
All whilst making tens of thousands of people redundant is an attempt to cut your way to prosperity.
It is all rather sad to see what has happened to a once-great IT company.
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Thursday 23rd November 2017 01:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Meg has an interesting view of recent HP history...
"Meg has an interesting view of recent HP history...
Problem is Meg that splitting up the company wasn't part of the original plan, was it?"
Michael Dell had the same problem - transforming his enterprise business - which didn't pan out as advertised either. His solution was different: take Dell Inc private. The cost of privatization? $24bn. No more pesky analysts from Wall St. asking how's that floundering enterprise transformation coming along, Michael? Priceless.
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Wednesday 22nd November 2017 21:39 GMT aazmi615@gmail.com
What's the difference between a CEO with industry vision and a career bureaucrat? When handed a struggling company, the first will successfully pivot the talent pool to competitiveness and profitability. The second will layoff staff to cut cost at a higher rate than revenues decline to report false profit. Microsoft's Satya is an example of the former, HP's M Hurd & M Whiteman are examples of the latter.
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Thursday 23rd November 2017 02:22 GMT R8it
It's more complex
Whitman is not an idiot (quite the opposite - she is very smart), but she was out of her depth as CEO of HP with no relevant domain expertise. This was the Board's fault with the appointment, not hers. She wanted to try and get the company to innovate its way forward using the 2011 5 year plan, but the results simply didn't come. Financial engineering, with its associated horrific human cost, became the only alternative available, and one which she aggressively pursued in order to deliver shareholder value (prompted by a now passed activist investor). Lacking expertise, Whitman relied on the advice of existing senior operating executives and more she brought in. Many were long tenured and had no better than average competence, but this was just as true of many of the shorter tenured imported executives too, most of whom gave her poor counsel.
Investment was spread too thin rather than focused - there were simply too many bets thrown against the wall hoping some would stick (lack of Whitman's expertise combined with poor advice). A ridiculous investment was made to compete with the HP Public Cloud (substantial opex that could have better served innovation in areas where HP could have actually succeeded) given HP had no chance to fund the capex required to compete with AWS or Azure long term. The Machine, now cancelled, was another poorly thought through initiative requiring millions in investment. However, most of these bets involved using the balance sheet and acquisitions. These acquisitions could be divided into two groups. The first were ones that never succeeded because initial opex investments were not sufficient and HP refused to fund or even expect the field sales force to build the sustained competencies to sell the new products effectively. Investments in Autonomy, Vertica and Security businesses were examples. The second group were acquisitions where initial investments were sufficient to allow a successful return, but they then fell foul of the big HP Achilles Heel - the Server business and Enterprise Services/EDS. These two businesses were huge and yet have not been effectively run with their respective strategies resulting in extremely low gross/operating margin percentages (the Cloudline fiasco targeting Tier 1 cloud providers being one example of chasing margins into negative territories; poor customer satisfaction driving loss of ES account revenue against high fixed costs being another). This put immense downward pressure on opex across the entire HP portfolio while trying to meet short term Wall St. expectations. Desperate measures to counter this impact resulted in the outsize influence of McKinsey and Bain consultants to drive short-sighted cuts that resulted in initially successful acquisitions turning into a stalled growth or downward spirals. Cutting specialist sales and marketing capabilities in areas like networking and storage were examples of these poorly judged actions. 3COM and 3PAR were examples of sub-optimized returns after significant initial success.
At the end of the day, changing the trajectory of HPE will be very difficult given the outsize dependency on the Server business for revenue and gross profit dollars. The acquisitions of Aruba, Nimble and Simplivity will fall into one of the two buckets described. As evidence, the latest earnings report was interesting given the focus on the need to add back storage specialists in the US given weak 3PAR performance. That is the beginning of yet another cycle of specialists vs generalists that regularly afflicts HP's Enterprise Business. Three years ago HP started cutting specialists in favor of account managers. Without specialists, Networking and Storage cannot succeed, and inevitably poorer performance resulted. So they now realize they need to start hiring more specialists. At some point, they will then reverse course when the cost of the sales force becomes too expensive and the server teams and sales executives say that it can all be done (more efficiently) with account managers and generalists. It's a never ending cycle, based on poor go-to-market strategy. I hope Neri can find a way to break the cycle successfully. If not, there is only the possibility of a steady decline. However, I for one do not wish this to happen and hope for the best. It is a great company that has been poorly served by its previous leadership.
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Sunday 26th November 2017 17:55 GMT Samsgrandad
Happy retirement.
"Her annual compensation package in 2016 was valued at just over $32m, and her net worth is an estimated $3.1bn."
As one of a group of HP retirees in the UK screwed by HPE(UK) on her watch, that's a great comfort that she will have a comfortable retirement.
The law in the the UK does not mandate pension reviews on contributions made before 1997, relying on companies doing the right thing.
No increase on pre-1997 pension has been made for over 14 years.