Thread regarding Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) layoffs

I think when one looks around the building and sees 1 analyst(powerpoint guru in reality) for every button pusher(worker with real defined duties), the issue is real clear of what HPE is facing. It is facing the shiny lure parable. The bass, hungry or not, with hit the shiny lure because it looks good. HPE’s shiny lure is metrics that don’t necessarily solve the issue, but look good in print. Hey, turnaround time is improved by 5%! Okay, but sales is down 15%.

ha ha! radioactive - love it - and a 61 the half life does not have to be that long!!!!

Do you think Meg has her own poorly secured email server at home?

i just sent the posting link to my colleagues who are now nWFH (not working from home!) with this latest smack in the teeth and threat to their job prospects.

whoever wrote this and those that chimed in totally nailed it.. what an utter disaster .. how soon before the story becomes a fabled Harvard Business School case study of how to really f**k a global business and brand.

I have been in the tech industry since 1989 and have never seen such a large and previously important company so adrift. Given Meg still has a job is hard to understand and shows how adept she is at striking her board and b---s---ti g on strategy. Despite HPE's quality products there remains a lack of focus on sales and motivating the rank and file emplyee. As usual its all about cost cutting. Only God can save this company!

I have no stock, so I do not care if the company spends money stupidly on failing comanies and then spins them off. This company is run into the ground and I just want two deposits a month for as long as I can get them. I will do my job properly and faithfully until they tell me to go home. I will always look for greener pastures.

a brilliant, long gone HP manager gave his team some sage advice before he was bundled out of Bracknell about 2 years ago:

you can't talk yourself out of a situation you behaved your way in to..

In the UK operation we are now constantly lied to, asked to move deals along the pipeline in salesforce when there is no status change by people who don't even understand what the products do that we sell to take the heat off them...

oh and we are also being told that we are unlikely to have the skills needed for HPE Next.

I vote for HPE Nexit

what is ultra-concerning about the posts here is no one, not a single person, is putting up any form of defence position in support of the company.

I was talking to a long term customer who summed up the problem - they simply said they no longer understood what HPE itself stood for as everything is wrapped in marketing BS terms he cannot connect to – so much so that he no longer knows how our products fit together or what they actually do.

He asked me what is a composable infrastructure hyper-converged compliant gen 10 hybrid cloud was as HPE marketing is telling him "the future belongs to the fast" and he really will benefit from it especially along the intelligent edge...

He then told me they have taken a decision to move as fast as they can to the Google Cloud Platform and don’t want HPE involved to add any more confusion into the mix.

The beer was good though and he said we can still be friends!

HPE as we knew is dead. They have made so many wrong decisions that it cannot survive. There is no technology leadership nor vision for the company, and the top executives do not even understand that they are not in a boxes market anymore. Customers are moving towards utility computing big way and that changes completely the buying pattern. Selling all services and software - instead of keeping Digital Transformation & Security services and Cloud & ITO software - has left the company with a commodity or near-commodity business whose target market is shrinking. Public Cloud and SaaS on one side are growing extremely fast, and cheap competitors are driving prices and profits down for the traditional infrastructure. The world requires more and more compute, storage and networking capacity, however the traditional companies that used to sell the infrastructure to support these requirements are shrinking or stagnant. Selling IT hardware today is like selling car transmissions. The value to the customer is far, far away, and the only thing that matters in most cases is price given that quality and features have been standardized. Yes, there are HW markets that grow, but they are not big enough to compensate for the huge reductions in industry standard x86 servers.

In this new world, HPE cannot support more than 40K people, and that means that about 20-25% of the company is going to be laid-off. At the same time, its IT operational systems are a disaster, there has been no serious investment in the last 3 years since the spin-offs started, this leaves the company with atrocious operational awareness and incapable of understanding new information. The age of a company should be measured by how good it is understanding external information and reacting to it, HPE is beyond saving on that aspect. They keep focused on their HW vision and have abandoned so many customers with the latest spin-offs that I am not sure they could walk that path back even if they wanted. So lay-offs will continue for the foreseeable future till somebody buys the company and puts it out of its misery by breaking it apart completely.

HPE in Atlanta went 'Project Manager" happy years ago. Lets take someone who has a PMP and let then redesign the entire customer - deliverables - account management process and jam it down on those who are actually trying to assist and service these accounts. They only problem is that they have never even seen or spoke to a customer or those who service them. Most are still trying to figure out of the customers have two heads or three. Don't question the new processes or procedures - you are not a team player no matter how dumb the new processes are..

Just remember this - there is a better life after HP - I was WFR'ed several months ago and life if better once you taste it. Its just scary when you are first toss out the door. I had 20 years some were good. The last few not so much.

I do hope the best for HPe, Left some good friends and people there. But most of the folks I know are no longer there either.

I think the person who wrote the original piece was trying to be balanced and objective... and the tipping point is down to the crux point about the very existence of HPE in the future.

In their conclusion they are implying we are finished as a business in anything that resembles its current form. Way to go the executive team - hope you are all proud of your catastrophically destructive super powers.

True. It is 2 years to date since TippingPoint was jettisoned. Trend Micro was the buyer which by the way is doing extremely well.

Good original post. I agree with most all of it with the exception, HPE is past the tipping point. BTW, didn't we buy and wreck a company with a name like that? Good Luck to All!

short answer, yes, longer answer, yes ... because .... the last thing HPE needs is a mass panic.

So the timing of any announcements are carefully managed with a full PR comms packages for internal and external consumption which are meticulously planned with lots of "stay focused and deliver the numbers" statements from the great and the good to the unwashed masses - i.e. us.

After all their bonuses depend on your performance.

So we are being lied to from Meg down about how bad things really are?

First we had a salesman

then a "relationship" manager

then a telesales contact

then an email/website relationship

..... and then we found a new supplier for storage in NetApps

who actually care about our business

are grateful for the money we spend

and don't treat us like yo-yo knickered h--kers whenever their revenue numbers are light

No more shaking of the money tree for HPE

$2m annual infra hardware spend, very happy Ex-HPE customer.

With the regional laywrs gone (APJ, Americas, EMEA) and scale down from 160 to 80 countries,elimination of 3-4 hierachical levels, it can be expected that thousands will be WFRed in the coming weeks and months.

right sizing at hpe ... at this point the term right sizing is to hpe business strategy what a "pull my finger" joke is to Shakespeare...

"Reality??" There's not a darn thing you can do about it Things are terrible EVERYWHERE...

As G.G. would say, "'cause it's WRECKABLE!"

would normally agree on the last comment but this commentary deserves a thread of its own

Who's the guy who keeps copying replies and creating new posts out of them. Please stop it, you're polluting the topics.