The HPE Corner

HPE CEO, Meg Whitman, resigned from the board of HPQ, the company that focuses on printers and PCs and for many this wasn’t entirely unexpected. For some time now it has become apparent to HPE followers that the changes aren’t completely over and that there is more to come. Even as Whitman vehemently denied she was going to become the next boss of Uber, something unusual in itself as Whitman typically doesn’t respond to rumors. The rate of change occurring within HPE shows no signs of letting up. Is it Whitman’s plans to stay the course and see as upward trend to hybrid IT develops or is it all part of a plan to clear the decks in preparation for someone new to take HPE to the next level?

In conversations with leaders within the NonStop vendor community one thing has become apparent; whether real or not, there seems to be a dearth of visionaries within HPE at the moment! It’s all well and good to say HPE is heads-down executing on key focus areas:  Data Center Integration, Cloud and Software Defined, and Edge / IoT,  but when it comes to vision are the evangelistic visionaries capable of redirecting the whole industry? Well, I don’t think so and for the NonStop community always anxious for HPE to more aggressively promote NonStop it’s all a little disheartening.

Lower down in the organization the work continues unabated. And as far as NonStop is concerned, there has been so many new capabilities introduced that we cannot ignore just how well NonStop development is performing in meeting customers’ needs. The commoditization of NonStop hardware has been in the works for some time and went through many phases but now, running on industry standard x86 is something many of us never expected to see. As for virtualization and the ability of NonStop to run on physical and virtual machines as has now become possible? Well, that was the stuff other vendors promoted aggressively, surely most unlikely to come from NonStop development, and if this is what you had thought then think again.

Of course, visions can become problematic as oftentimes they promote extremes. Furthermore, visionaries left unchecked can promote products and solutions that simply don’t exist and that would likely be less revolutionary than expected once fully developed. However, this doesn’t lessen the value knowledgeable visionaries can provide as we all watch trends as they develop and we all want to be sure we are steering our management down a path that those responsible for supporting in the years to come will be only too happy to be associated with. When it comes to HPE at the highest level – there simply isn’t the visionary that I would expect a company of the size of HPE to have onboard. For those attending this year’s HPE Discover event in Las Vegas and had an opportunity to talk with HPE Labs’ Kirk Bresniker, would recognize that there are some HPE managers quite capable of projecting a vision for HPE, but again, not even Kirk would suggest his observations and commentaries would be enough to change the course of technology as it pertains to enterprise deployments.

Without designated visionaries, can arguments be made in favor of the longer term prospects of a vendor even one as large as HPE? For many industry observers there is a consensus that visionaries most definitely are required and fill a very important role. It is they who hold the candle high for all of us to see the path that lies ahead. Again, as a community, all those involved with NonStop have it better than other groups within HPE as we have a development and product management team that is serving us all very well at this point, but it would be nice to see NonStop featured in a much bigger vision of HPE and to see it being more closely integrated with the three primary focus areas.

Nothing written here should surprise anyone within the NonStop community. It’s often raised at user events, wherever they are held around the world. However, as we watch the HPE CEO Whitman disengage more and more from what had been HP, it does raise the prospect that there will be something new and possibly completely unexpected developing at HPE that will probably see the company making a break with its past once this financial year wraps up. And perhaps, one of the more visible signs that such a change is taking place may not be changes among the executive team, with perhaps the roles of CEO and President are revisited, but the emergence of a visionary who has already turned heads at enterprises everywhere. Not sure who that might be even as it would be pointless to speculate at this time but there is a void to be filled and the longer it takes for someone to surface who can not only hold that candle high but rally around the candleholders from every group within HPE. Then it will not be a path being illuminated but a huge multilane highway and perhaps the fast lane will be filled with NonStop!