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.
Posted by @PjLRL4q-4crm, excellent commentary.