HPE Discover 2018: CEO Neri Says HPE Will Become a More Attractive Partner to Resellers
One day ahead of his official coming-out party, the new CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise touted the company’s rapid growth and future prospects to several thousand resellers and other key partners as part of the HPE Discover Global Partner Summit in Las Vegas.
“I’ve been with the company for over 20 years, and I’ve had the opportunity to work with every business line in pretty much every region,” said Antonio Neri, who is making his first appearance at HPE Discover as CEO after succeeding Meg Whitman in February. “We see a future of opportunity and growth. This is a very talented company, a company that never stops innovating and has a clear understanding of what that future looks like for customers and partners.”
Neri said that “for me, nothing has changed” about HPE’s business strategy, which he and Whitman worked on together. That strategy is to create value for organizations that generate, store and use data.
“What we see is an explosion of apps and data everywhere,” he said. “We see a world where everything has to be understood quickly, and most of that data is now generated at the edge. That edge is the place where we all live and work, where billions of people and trillions of things come together. That’s where the action is. We see a world where everything will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled and data-centric. That’s the future. So you’ll see HPE pivot quickly to that opportunity.”
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HPE Vows to Simplify Its Business Processes
According to Neri, the company is working hard to improve how it does business with its partners, who account for about 70 percent of its sales. He acknowledged that “today, we have a lot of friction in the system,” and said he’s working to eliminate it. “We’re making a significant investment in simplifying our company,” Neri said. “Not just layers and bureaucracy, but really improving the way we do business with you in terms of process and systems. Over the nine quarters you’re going to see a tremendous amount of change in the way we engage with you.”
He and others also lauded HPE’s big announcement of the day: an advancement of its GreenLake Flex Capacity, an on-premises technology consumption model that allows customers to buy only as much infrastructure as they need. With GreenLake Flex Capacity, customers can access a range of popular technology products, including software-defined infrastructure and all-flash storage, without big upfront costs. For HPE’s partners, the offering provides recurring revenue and attractive margins.
The new offering will allow its resellers and integrators to offer GreenLake Flex Capacity directly to their customers, racking up a number of incentives to do so.
Citing IDC research, HPE says that within two years as much as 40 percent of businesses’ infrastructure spending will be done on a consumption basis. Today only about 5 percent of HPE infrastructure sales are consumption-based, meaning the company has a big opportunity to grow Infrastructure as a Service in a short period of time.
“Customers increasingly want to pay for the infrastructure they consume each month — allowing flexibility to scale up or down as required, while avoiding capital expenses,” HPE says in a release.
