
HP and HPE just conducted their final earnings teleconference with industry analysts as a single, consolidated company. From here on out, HP and HPE will report their earnings separately.
If you listened to the earnings call, you had the pleasure of hearing HP Enterprise’s CEO Meg Whitman make candid comments concerning the direction of other cloud hardware vendors.
Whitman didn’t hold back as she is quoted as saying:
“We feel really good about our strategy relative to what we see Dell and EMC doing. They could not be in more stark contrast. They’re getting bigger, leveraging up, and doubling down mostly on legacy technology. While our strategy is to get smaller. I’ve just spent the last four years de-leveraging the balance sheet and leaning into new technology, like converged infrastructure, new server architectures, 3Par with all flash [enterprise storage], Aruba, etc.”
This presents an interesting dynamic as it has also been reported that Whitman sent out an email shortly after the Dell/EMC merger was announced, saying that Dell/EMC were two years behind the curve.
With this said, HPE and Whitman have recently announced that they are ditching the HP Helion public cloud platform. HPE will now refer clients to Microsoft Azure as the company has announced a strategic partnership between itself and Microsoft on a variety of solutions.
We recently published an article detailing Microsoft and HPE’s initial agreement on solutions, however, as more information comes out, it seems like HPE and Microsoft will more closely knit than originally thought.
What could the future hold for HPE? Is Whitman correct in her assumption that HPE is going in the right direction, while Dell/EMC are two years behind? Tell us what you think about the HPE CEO’s comments in the section below.