Journey of Discovery
Hewlett Packard Enterprise may be half the size of the old HP, but its ambitions are just as big, it claimed at its first-ever Discover event in London
You might be forgiven for thinking the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has very little to do with the HP split. But when CRN asked Andy Isherwood, UK managing director of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), what the biggest challenge the new firm has faced in its first month, the floppy-haired politician was singled out.
"Getting ready for Discover!" Isherwood said. "Joking apart, it's a big event. You've got the glitterati coming in from the US, you've got 13,000 customers and partners and then Boris Johnson digging the roads up. There are a lot of things to think about."
After negotiating the capital's traffic, HPE execs, partners and customers from across the world descended on the Excel centre for Discover. The event has run for a number of years under the HP brand, but this year marked its first dedicated to HPE.
The company, which has more than 250,000 staff globally and revenues of $53bn (￡35bn), is split into four divisions: Enterprise Group, Enterprise Services, Software, and Financial Services. Former HP chief execuitve Meg Whitman retains the title at HPE, while becoming president of HP Inc, the other company formed when the global giant halved.
On taking to the Discover stage on day one, the first thing Whitman (pictured) talked about was partners.
"Technologies may change and business models may shift," she told the packed auditorium.
"But one thing never changes for us, and that is the importance of our relationships with you, our customers and partners. That was the foundation of Hewlett-Packard more than 75 years ago and it will remain the foundation of Hewlett Packard Enterprise far into the future."
Leading by example
The process of splitting HP into two, by all accounts, went smoothly. On the day before the legal separation, Isherwood told CRN the process went better than expected - so much so, that it was "bizarre", and the company's partners agreed, claiming it was business as usual throughout.
Whitman is so proud of the way her company completed such a seemingly large task in just a year that on the Discover stage, she unveiled a new services offering HPE would offer other firms seeking similar organisational shake-ups.
"It really was an amazing process," she said. "And throughout this complex process of separating Hewlett Packard, we got really good at this kind of work, at a scale that most companies would never even attempt.
"So what we decided to do was create a new service practice where we use everything we learned in separating Hewlett Packard and put that knowledge to work for you.
"So if your company is thinking about a merger, an acquisition, or a divestiture, you should call us to help you with this IT separation because I'm convinced that no one [else] has done this at this kind of scale in this kind of timeframe."
HPE cosies up to the UK government
A surprise guest at HPE Discover was Cabinet Office and Civil Service leader John Manzoni, who spoke about IT's role in transforming the public sector. His appearance was described as "quite a coup" by TechMarketView analyst Georgina O'Toole, who was at the gathering.
In his address, Manzoni veered slightly from the government's much-vaunted pro-SME agenda and, perhaps unsurprisingly at an HPE conference, talked up the benefits of working with larger firms.
Since the coalition came to power in 2010, working with smaller suppliers across government, and especially in IT, has been a priority. The government has talked at length about the benefits of moving away from signing massive, long-term IT deals with huge suppliers - such as HP - in favour of agreeing shorter-term, lower-value deals with smaller suppliers. Schemes such as G-Cloud have acted as the poster child for this idea, and Manzoni namechecked the framework during his speech, talking up its value.
On the surface, this move would appear to be bad news for HP, even in its smaller guises of HPE and HP Inc. But Manzoni insisted there is still a great deal of merit in working with the big boys.
"One part of what is really important [is] the small enterprises," he said. "But on the other hand, we are doing some of the most important things in the UK government and we need some of the best companies to help us. So, just focusing on the very small companies is not good enough.
"We need to create partnerships and we need to create opportunities for the very best companies in all ways to come and help us do what we need to do. It is a complex environment... and the job is far, far from done. We still have a lot to do."
Manzoni (pictured) added that government ought to "up its game" and work better with the private sector, due to a severe skills shortage across government.
TechMarketView's O'Toole said that admitting this is a good way to avoid repeating some of the mistakes made in the past which led to a number of IT projects failing.
"[Manzoni] admitted that UK government doesn't have, and will never have, enough of the right skills," she said. "If UK government is now admitting that complex digital projects such as Universal Credits and HMRC's digital tax accounts need the likes of HP and its peers, that is as good a start as any."
Microsoft and HPE forge closer ties on hybrid cloud
HP and Microsoft have worked together for more than 30 years on a range of technologies, including PCs and tablets. A month into its life as an independent company, HPE forged a new tie with the software giant in the form of a hybrid cloud agreement.
The deal will see Microsoft Azure become a preferred public cloud partner for HPE customers, while HPE will be a preferred partner in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft's hybrid cloud offerings. The two will work together on engineering and services to help customers adapt to changing IT business models.
The partnership will see HPE become a reseller of all first-party services from Microsoft, but both firms were keen to stress this should not ring alarm bells for their respective channels.
Garth Fort, Microsoft's general manager for cloud and enterprise, said the opposite would actually be the case.
"Today we've got 31,000 joint channel partners which are shared between Microsoft and HP," he said. "In a simple way, this is reaffirming the commitment to those 31,000 shared partners.
"We ensure we are doing the engineering work upfront so the systems that come from a combined Microsoft and HP have a lot of the complexity taken out. This is about simplifying how our joint channel partners can sell and go to market with services from Microsoft along with services and hardware from HP."
Isherwood boasts strong start for HPE UK
Aside from bemoaning London's traffic troubles, HPE's UK boss Andy Isherwood (pictured) gave an update on the firm's performance so far.
Although at the time the company had been established for just a month, Isherwood said things were off to a strong start.
"We don't divulge the UKI figures but directionally they are better than the worldwide figures," he said.
In the recent results for Q4 - its final quarter before the split - HP reported a one per cent annual slump in GAAP net profit to $1.3bn on sales which over the same period fell nine per cent to $25.7bn.
Isherwood added: "We are seeing a very balanced growth across all our [UK] businesses. I'm not going to talk about storage, servers and networking etcetera, suffice to say across the business we saw growth in all segments and it was typically in high single digits and in newer high-growth markets, significantly more than that. So we definitely feel good about the market."
In previous conversations with CRN, Isherwood has said the UK government recently began looking at IT and how it can transform the public sector, rather than turning to it purely to cut costs.
Speaking at HPE Discover, he welcomed Manzoni's comments on how large firms can help achieve this.
"We are feeling confident because the market is strong [and] government brings a level of stability at the moment," he said. "It was really nice to see and hear and talk about what big can do as well as what small can do."