HP Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman To Step Down (reuters.com)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman is stepping down as chief executive officer. Reuters reports: Whitman engineered the biggest breakup in corporate history during her 6 year tenure at the helm, creating HPE and PC-and-printer business HP Inc from parent Hewlett Packard Co in 2015. Whitman will be succeeded by the company's president, Antonio Neri, who takes over from Feb. 1. "Now is the right time for Antonio and a new generation of leaders to take the reins of HPE," Whitman said in a statement. Whitman, who will continue as a board member, had been steering the company towards areas such as networking, storage and technology services.

Comments

Not surprising

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Their OpenStack and cloud initiatives didn't really bring in a lot of new business.

HP hasn't been terribly innovative. People who were buying Cisco and other brand name servers are still doing it, and Amazon/Google/Microsoft are emerging as the major cloud providers.

The OpenStack philosophy essentially banks on hardware being interoperable and somewhat interchangeable, so competition is guaranteed. It replaces some proprietary software with FOS software. It's great that HP contributed, but there is no licensing revenue and no hardware lock-in. That puts some grit in the gears of corporate profiteering.

Then at the top, the huge enterprises like Google and Amazon have started using custom hardware. Others, like Facebook, are forcing commoditization of core infrastructure with Open Compute. Most of them are combining cheap x86 servers with custom hardware to some extent. Either way, the enterprise IT companies are forced to compete as components rather than drop-in "solutions" with support contracts, which is where the enormous profits have been.

I'm not sure what their strategy was. And regardless of what Whitman planned, HPE hasn't reestablished itself as the behemoth it once was.