I’ve been around HPE (HP) a long time, and I’m still hopeful about this company. But it’s only a matter of time before there are serious changes at the top, Antonio and parts of the board included. We need to clean out the toxic, arrogant pockets of leadership, rebuild a stronger executive bench, and refocus on performance and execution. Somewhere along the way we drifted from our roots as a true engineering company. I never understood walking away from Silicon Valley when the core talent, partners, and competitors are all based there. The Houston centric culture of optics, and weak management isn’t helping; we’ve got too many VPs and Directors and not enough doers. I wouldn’t be surprised to see activists like Elliott turn up the pressure, especially with large institutional HPE holders like BlackRock and Vanguard watching closely. HPE can get back to being great, but it’s going to take a reset in leadership, culture, and how we invest.
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@1xp Wow, the post below is so right on it's scary. I'm just hoping that Elliott gives the stock the "Hurd" effect so I can get out with a profit to make it worth my while to have held on to it for too long.
@OP hpe is not a tech company since a loooong time . hpe is the only company claiming falsely to be an IT , when all of their product range does not belong to them and is not internal development but all of it a subject of acqusitions Servers = Compaq , Storage ok total mess but 3par , nimble , and 3-4 more outsiders , Networking hahaha , SW a mess whenever it is mentioned Supercomputing OK... Cray , HCI some Simplivity some Nutanix OEM some new stuff on Linux , so in reality were talking about a ''Holding'' Company that pretends it is a tech company and fools itself and the unfortunate customers that trust it . All of this bundled sometimes but not always by a leasing option called '' Greenlake'' and christened a cloud solution when in reality it is an expensive leasing option with the worse of breed parts you can buy . So , riding the AI wave now , before that ballon pops and hpe will be irrelevant as it really is , and worse of all they don't know it
@ct
Totally understand your skepticism re: Elliott.
Elliot is one of the best and most productive activist investor firms operating today. They know exactly what is going on at Hpe ..and did before they made the investment.
Since they only got 1 Board seat, (and may get a 2nd).. it might take a little while to get Board buy-in to execute their plan, which I assure you..they have a plan.
Elliott has ousted 14 CEOs at companies where it got involved.
I would say stay tuned..my $ is on Elliott.
@1kx - You cannot drive high-end innovation while distancing yourself from the ecosystems that produce it.
Lower taxes don’t create engineering breakthroughs. They don’t help you build a networking business capable of taking on Cisco, and they don’t position you anywhere near the AI and GPU talent orbiting NVIDIA. Geography matters. Ecosystems matter. Access to top-tier technical talent matters.
If a company claims it wants to be a serious player in advanced networking, AI, or compute, it has to put itself where the innovation is actually happening. And today, the deepest engineering talent pools for those domains are still overwhelmingly in California.
That isn’t politics, it’s industry physics. You can’t wish an innovation ecosystem into existence. And pretending location doesn’t matter might win online arguments, but it doesn’t win technology markets.
Now we get goofs like Gartner and Boombox to really mess things up!
It sounds like some of these posters have been smoking too much of that Kalifornia Kush. Everybody knows that Kalifornia is no longer business friendly and the next Democrat governor is probably going to be worse than Gruesome Newsom.
@1c1 Let’s be honest… Houston was never exactly the “inspiration capital” of HPE.
A California return would inject the kind of energy the company’s been missing for years.
Antonio will retire; Rami will be CEO; HPE will return to California with a refreshed Sunnyvale HQ.
What does HPE do that everyone else isn’t doing too? He-l, even the major players in tech and AI are building their own systems now.
I agree
Yeah, they're shooting to be the best of the worst...
Hard to drift when you follow what everyone else is doing, usually several years too late.
I'm sorry but HPE isn't anything like the HP I started with in 1990 when the company actually cared about their employees. When you care about your employees they do a good job for you. Now you're just a pawn to make the C-Suite's bank accounts bigger and there is no loyalty.
Elliott will be the nail in the coffin for this rudderless, soulless company!
HPE is long past innovation and being an engineering company and there's no need for Silicon Valley. Houston and DC are where you go to spin the wheels and traunch up empty deals for the bonus. A company with the size and scope of HPE can ride this meaningless phase for at least ten more years, during which time you still get paid for minding your station. If you still want to do something with your career, find a small company. But you'll have to work, and most HPErs have forgotten how to do that.
Accountability starts at the top. So does arrogance and a culture of getting by on the backs of other people. The CEO and a few of his staff - you know who they are - are secretly quietly using the people below them for their own glory. Listen to their words - it’s all non-speak buzzwords that superficially sound great but there’s no substance. JUST LIKE THEIR LEADERSHIP. As far as I’m concerned Elliott doesn’t really yet know what’s going on around here otherwise he would have already made his cuts.