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

Posted by BeauHD on from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.

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.

9 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Time to cash out by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    All you did Meg was fire a lot of people under the pretense of splitting up a company.
    And you got paid a lot of money for it while a lot of people hit the skids.
    Well F**king done.

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    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
    1. Re:Time to cash out by hambone142 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Know the situation well. Meg accomplished absolutely NOTHING during her tenure at HP. I got a kick out of her splitting off printers and PCs. Walter Hewlett proposed that before Fiorina ousted him from the Board of Directors. Meg does it and it's "visionary".

      Let's face it. She ran a soap company, a toy company and occupied space at eBay.

      HPE and HPinc are both circling the drain because the past four (count 'em, FOUR) CEOs were bean counters and had no ability to lead an effort to develop new products. They saw an easy way out by attempting to acquire companies and their products but absolutely NONE of the acquisitions have produced anything meaningful.

      I'm hoping the new CEO of HPE will provide some direction as he is a technical person. However, most of what was HP management was displaced by Compaq "yes men" and cronies. Most competent technical people have left the companies or were laid off for "cost savings".

      You can't "save costs" in to success. Actual innovation has to happen to provide value to a company.

      This revolving door of CEOs at HP (yeah, it's "HPE" now) provided nothing except an excuse to "loot and scoot" by a procession of incompetent CEOs and their friends.

      They really should take the founder's names off of the company. It's a disgrace to their legacy.

  2. Not surprising by EndlessNameless · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  3. Bad news for investors by Aighearach · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So the long and short of it, the stock price is dropping because she was never brought in to lead, she was brought in to part it out and sell things off! And they have no confidence the new guy can convince anybody to buy the lemons they have left, if she couldn't.

    This means, if you didn't get out already, you missed the boat.

    HPE will now stabilize and will have to live with a stock price that has less of a speculation bonus.

  4. Who would be your "dream CEO" for HP? by leonbev · · Score: 3

    Who would you like to see become the new head of HP, if you got to choose from any acting corporate executive? Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Sergey Brin? Someone else?

    Come on, guys, considering how bad HP's picks have been for the past few decades, I think that we can do better!

    1. Re:Who would be your "dream CEO" for HP? by Strider- · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Unfortunately the real geniuses at HP left when they spun off Agilent... Test & Measurement was really the heart and soul of the company, and the real brains behind the operation.

      --
      ...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
    2. Re:Who would be your "dream CEO" for HP? by ebh · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Ann Livermore should have gotten the job instead of Carly.

    3. Re:Who would be your "dream CEO" for HP? by Strider- · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Low grade desktop and laptop vendor. Decent servers.

      The ProLiant division lives with HPE... They're dead to me now that they started requiring you to have a support contract in order to get firmware updates. Otherwise, it's still solid, well built gear. Next time 'round I'll probably look at Dell or Lenovo.

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      ...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
  5. Re:Let's be honest here... by sexconker · · Score: 3

    Dr. Lisa Su is doing quite well.