Agile and focused. That’s the primary marketing message from HPE at its Discover conference in London. That message is supporting the recent moves to sell off its software division to MicroFocus and its ‘spin-merge’ its enterprise services group out and merge it with CSC. Those moves leave behind a core company focused on infrastructure solutions. According to Jason Newton, Vice President of HPE Marketing, the reason is to allow HPE to become the leader in hybrid IT solutions.
HPE is changing itself, intentionally making itself a smaller company, so that it can be more agile and nimble in the marketplace, with a laser focus on hybrid IT solutions. Its newly refined mission is “leading in Hybrid IT, powering the intelligent edge and the services to bring it together.” HPE is no longer looking to be a one-stop shop and be everything to everyone.
HPE will retain services in the company with its Technology Services. The confusing thing is that HPE, and HP before it, has always had two different services organizations – a point of confusion. So which stays and which goes? The services to be spun out of the company is Enterprise Services (ES) – the organization that handled infrastructure outsourcing, managed services, application transformation services to external companies. Essentially, Enterprise Services is the old Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
Technology Services, on the other hand, is the services organization that works with HPE’s customers for implementations and assists with the configuration and maintenance of the infrastructure products that it manufactures. This closely aligns to the core focus of the new HPE.
In the same vein, software isn’t leaving HPE completely. HPE is retaining the software that drives infrastructure and orchestration, closely tied to its hardware. The software being sold off are the enterprise software applications and SaaS offerings – like Vertica, Autonomy and other packaged software solutions.
It is also an interesting position for the company, while spinning off assets in areas like software and security, it opens them up to partner with best of breed solutions in the market instead of being tied to specific solutions within other divisions of the company. As a customer, you can see strategically how HPE storage has worked with partners like Veeam, while competing with itself and its own HPE Data Protector software. Having run HPE Data Protector, the Veeam partnership is a great thing for HPE and should have certainly been allowed and embraced. Conflicts like this seemingly disappear with the sale of its software division.
