HPE's Azure Stack Hub future 'in doubt' as US staff canned, SimpliVity team cut, India picks up the pieces

Over the past two weeks, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has axed roughly 150 positions in the US, including Azure Stack Hub engineering roles and at least part of its SimpliVity team. An individual with knowledge of the situation told The Register that HPE axed eight of its US employees working on the Azure Stack Hub project on …

[Anonymous Coward]

Doomed to fail

I am shocked that HPE shares still hold any kind of value. Not a single CEO in memory can be trusted imo. They have been cost cutting and offshoring for 10 years in a row now. First they split the company to protect the consumer business (HP inc) and then started spinning/selling off the valuable software and services divisions along with the support contracts (Microfocus, Suse, DXC). To top that off, they have been shutting down R&D facilities and exiting Cloud markets like it was going out of fashion. Whats left you ask? What is now known as "Pointnext" services and a dying hardware business masquerading as a "hybrid IT" business. Except they don't actually provide any services. The initial strategy was to sell the company for parts but half way through they seem to have attempted to reinvent themselves as a super computing vendor, obviously by acquisitions and ironically after writing off expensive R&D projects like The Machine. That would also mean that the mainstream enterprise business is doomed to failure.

Expect 30 000 more redundancies. At least HP inc lives on as the original brand. HPE was never meant to be a serious company.

[Anonymous Coward]

Business as Usual

The HP of 50 years ago, with Packard as the bad cop, did not hesitate to shut down a product or product line or division which was not performing financially.

The HP of 35 years ago was already transferring R&D for mature product lines to the very capable team in Bangalore, redeploying the much more expensive US engineers to growth products and product lines. That HP already required every manager with P&L responsibility to have a plan on file for the resizing of their business should revenue or profit targets be missed; implementation of that plan was mandatory if numbers were missed.

The HP of 20 years ago was already very good at industry consolidation acquisitions, and already swift to eliminate people and facilities not necessary to the ongoing business.

It's pretty clear what happened here: at least one line of business from Simplivity was declared mature and transitioned to non US engineering; and at least one line of business did not make its numbers and was resized as a result.

The sky did not fall. This is what running a responsible business looks like: the adjustments are made in real time, not saved up for a giant layoff and an enormous writedown.

[NeilPost]

Re: Business as Usual

Trouble is HP of today is not redeploying the skilled engineers on new project’s and products they are just being tossed out and what work they had is being moved to reassuringly cheap people in India.

[ManMountain1]

Re: Business as Usual

It literally said in the article that most people had been redeployed and not terminated - the enterprise giant was able to "transition a significant number of those team members, so they were never actually terminated."

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Business as Usual

The article didn't say "most", it said "a significant number". Weasel words such as these need to be treated with a good deal of scepticism. How large is significant? What if it's 2?

[Version 1.0]

Re: Business as Usual

Definitely, they were just fired, not "terminated" godfather style.

[Anonymous Coward]

Simplivity was declared mature and transitioned to non US engineering

lol. You are so full of it. Simplivity was acquired in 2017, specialising in the Software Defined Data Centre space. You know that same "mature" market that VMware, Openstack, Nutanix, AWS and Azure have made an absolute killing by disrupting the traditional in house IT. The plan was very much to get a piece of that pie and by leveraging their existing customer base in order to do it. But HPE in typical fashion are completely incapable or competing in the modern age. They buy successful and promising companies, replace the leadership with their executives and then generate profits the only way they know how. By cost cutting and offshoring. R&D is the first thing to go in HPE. And then they wonder why their acquisitions fail. Because those companies actually valued innovation. No startup acquisition is going to come along and hand HPE the next AWS on a silver platter. They have to build it themselves. A completely alien concept.

[Zed Zee]

Re: Simplivity was declared mature and transitioned to non US engineering

Let's not get our technologies mixed up here. SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware SDDC, Pivot3, OpenStack, Azure Stack HCI and so on, are indeed, all HCI platforms. Not all the same. Not all equal. But they are all HCI platforms.

Microsoft Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Google Anthos are Hybrid Clouds, designed to integrate with existing public cloud services, from the same vendors.

Azure, AWS and GCP are the public cloud platforms, pure and simple.

So now that we have these clearly defined, we may proceed with the debate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Business as Usual

As an HP(E) customer, I can tell you that the customer experience has noticeably gone downhill. I remember going down to the labs in Cupertino where the c7000 enclosure was being demoed and getting a look at the first release, which my company enthusiastically deployed. Now HPE won't even talk to us about Synergy enclosures unless we commit to a three-frame deployment. Our inside reps at HPE are on a revolving door system, and getting any kind of consistency out of the relationship is nearly impossible. As a result, we're cutting the cord and moving over to Cisco UCS, and we were an all-HP shop for basically two decades.

If that's business as usual, your business sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Business as Usual

Good luck with Cisco UCS. Absolutely no roadmap and R&D in comparison to Synergy.

Cisco and Dell won’t be far behind with job cuts .. the world’s economy is contracting ... HPE are moving quickly to redeploy it’s resources like any responsible business should. Let’s see what all the big giants Finacial results look like in the next 12 months

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Business as Usual

"Good luck with Cisco UCS."

Thanks! We've already found it easier to deploy and manage than HPE enclosures, and the UCS blades perform better as well! Synergy may have more of a roadmap, but the road appears to lead straight through a brick wall, off a cliff, and into an active volcano.

[Anonymous Coward]

HPE <senior managers who have a bonus to protect, unrealistic shareholder expectations to meet, and will have cashed in way before the shit hits the fan>, however, do not share that view.

FTFY.

[fredesmite2]

Remember when HP(E)'s logo was " Invent " .. ? I can't even get their various name right anymore it has changed so much.

Now it is "Outsourced to lowest bidder"

Their other attempt at building a cloud platform was stealing Debian Linux to make a Openstack deployment .. and that ended up in the gutter in about a year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it is "Outsourced to lowest bidder"

If only they were outsourcing it. They are not. R&D facilities in Europe were never replaced anywhere. Some responsibilities like bug fixing were "handed over" to support teams in Bangalore. This is absolutely not the same as outsourcing R&D. HPE has only cared about stockholder concerns where R&D value cannot be forecasted. Their amazing plan was to streamline the enterprise hardware business and sell it to one of the software giants (now this may still happen, but at scrap price). Their intentions were never to grow the company.

[Version 1.0]

I'm still using my 16C calculator

But I would not buy anything from them these days. My company bought one of their new printers, when it works it works OK but then sometimes it just doesn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm still using my 16C calculator

Thats hp inc not hpe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm still using my 16C calculator

Have an up vote for using a 16C though.

That's a product from when HP really was HP. Back when they didn't need to say "invent" because everyone knew that was what they did.

[Anonymous Coward]

HP converged failure

Simplivity was never going to win anyway, the company was on it’s financial deathbed when HP bought it. VCE, Nutanix and VMware were already way ahead. HPE cheaped out and bought Simplivity to “have something”. Then didn’t commit, offered competing internal server bundles, underinvested and failed.

Just like they did with their original converged systems. They gave that a year and no money. Then their HANA bundle. Then launched a Converged Systems Division, launched the “Shark”, gave it 6 months, fired Donatelli and failed again. Then some Microsoft bundles. Killed. VMware bundles. Then Simplivity. 3 years, shut down.

The constant has been Antonio Neri. He never believed in this stuff, underinvested, undermined, and quit early.