HPE UK off to a 'confident' start, claims Isherwood

London roadworks causing the biggest headache for new firm so far

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) UK is off to a "confident" start, according to its managing director Andy Isherwood, who said the biggest challenge so far has been "Boris Johnson digging the roads up", causing headaches when organising its Discover London event.

HPE Discover has attracted about 13,000 partners and customers as the firm's executives outline the future direction for the company. Yesterday the vendor announced closer ties with Microsoft on hybrid cloud and CEO Meg Whitman rallied the troops for the year ahead.

Speaking at a media Q&A session, Isherwood gave an update into how HPE UK is performing so far.

"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."

Yesterday, Cabinet Office leader John Manzoni took to the HPE stage to talk up the value large firms such as HP bring the government, veering somewhat from the pro-SME agenda the government has been pushing in recent months and years.

Isherwood welcomed Manzoni's comments.

"We are feeling confident because the market is strong [and] government brings a level of stability at the moment," he said. "The thing that was really nice to see and hear and talk about is what big can do as well as what small can do."

When asked by CRN what the biggest challenge HPE UK has experienced in its first month, Isherwood said planning for this week's event was up there.

"Getting ready for Discover!" he 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! You've got a lot of things to think about."