2016 saw the one-year anniversary of one of the most significant splits in IT history between HP Inc. and HPE.
HPE Canada’s first year without HP, saw the Canadian operation shine in the channel’s eyes. Channel partners saw the company become nimbler than before. HPE was still a leader in the majority of the market segments it serves, it managed to beef up its enterprise security portfolio, and upgraded its Partner Ready program significantly.
“When we were embracing the advent of our separation a year ago we were looking forward to being able to move faster and to have a deeper focus on the driving forces that are really driving change and opportunity in the market,” said Atkinson. “Here we are a year later and that vision is one that we have really realized. The agility, the empowerment, and the accountability that we have has just been phenomenal.”
HPE’s first year could not be called a disappointment by any stretch of the imagination. For a year of disruption that saw every corporate giant in the enterprise software space feel at least a little bit of struggle, HPE made moves to shine through. Third quarter reports had HPE net revenue down six per cent, but cash flow from operations up 10 per cent from the prior year period.
CDN spoke with IDC analyst and director of infrastructure channels research, Paul Edwards and he said: “Whether you are Dell or HPE, you saw disruption due to the changing industry this past year, so no matter how well HPE has reacted to that disruption, it was unavoidable.”
“They’re satisfaction scores have risen, and I would say they are more nimble than before. Overall, this year was relatively positive,” Edwards added.
Considering HPE is a leader in the majority of the market segments it serves at first in servers, second in networking, second in total storage, and second in IT services, and that 80 per cent of Fortune 500 customers are HPE Enterprise Services customers, relatively positive is the right word.
“We put a tremendous amount of focus on helping our customers move into the world of agile dev-ops and hybrid IT, “ said Atkinson. “When you look at our converged systems and hyper-converged offerings, we’ve done extremely well, especially in the large enterprise space, helping our customers really operate in the mobile world we live in, and how to make hybrid IT simple.”