That title might sound odd…although to those that have watched HPE closely for the last few years (and back into its HP version), the meaning is probably clear.
My colleagues Scott Sinclair and Bob Laliberte have written insightful summaries and analyses in their blogs about the event. Here are the links to Bob and Scott's blog. There’s no point me reiterating what they have already covered thoroughly. Scott and Bob and I also put together this ESG On Location Video from the event with some additional thoughts.
I would like to come back to one point. Whether you view it as a pro or a con, one thing is clear: it was tough to leave Discover with one single encapsulation of what HPE is about…or even about to be. I don’t view that as either a plus or a minus.
- If you’re looking to be negative, then HPE’s range of announcements, initiatives, and commitments can be easy to poke at; it introduced cloud, storage, data management, HCI, analytics, networking and services products, on the one hand, while committing to its impending ‘as a Service’ option - balanced with its ‘Cloudless’ vision - on the other.
- And if you’re looking to be positive, then HPE is turning the ship (or perhaps, corporate flotilla is a better term) around, and some [parts of the] vessels will get there before others. It’s not a bad thing – simply a fact of life, physics, and – in this case – pragmatic business.
HPE suffers (or benefits! – it’s your perception-choice) from having to serve a wide range of customers across industries, geographies…and IT attitudes. It is constrained to keep a foot firmly in the traditional camp even while leading the “horse” of IT consumption to a more attractive watering hole! It is not the crispness of the explanation that matters as much as the crispness of the execution. And at Discover this year I saw belief in the multiple parallel journeys from customers and HPE-ers alike.
