The HPE Corner

For the NonStop community everything taking place within HPE is important. Even as it’s hard to imagine that it was only late last year when HP separated into two businesses, HP Inc. (HPQ) and HP Enterprise (HPE). HP Inc. retained the HP logo while HPE adopted the green rectangle and for a while, the two organizations seemed to be operating with only slightly more independence than they had prior to the split. In other words, there never was a great deal of integration between HP’s consumer and enterprise products and for many financial analysts, it proved hard to accurately peg the market segment HP belonged to when comparing the financial performance of HPE with other companies.

Looking more closely at HPE, it was still a conglomerate as it was comprised of infrastructure, software and services. Each with vastly different business models in terms of how they needed to be managed, the margins they generated and indeed, the cash funding required. What we have now seen from HPE CEO, Meg Whitman, over the course of just a few months is the announcement of the “spin-merge” of both the services (to CSC) and the software (Micro Focus). There is still a long way to go before both of these deals are finalized but it’s fair to assume that they will all be wrapped up during 2017, after which, investors will hold in their hands not only stock in HPQ and HPE but will have in their hands shares of both the new CSC as well as Micro Focus. In other words, those all-important financial analysts who ultimately influence the value of any publicly-traded enterprise will now be able to compare the performance of each company against the competitors they most closely resemble.

For the NonStop community, this has many benefits. While HPE spin-merged non-core software, NonStop is being recognized for what it truly is – a value play and along with its brethren within the Mission Critical Systems (MCS) group headed by Randy Meyer has become part of the all-important Data Center Infrastructure Group (DCIG) headed by Senior VP & GM, Alain Andreoli. Think in terms of the non-core software now being spun out and merged with Micro Focus as all part of a software business run no differently than you would expect from any other software vendor whereas NonStop is software that is a critical part of infrastructure.

Furthermore, and here’s the biggest benefit, with the uptick of interest in clouds within global enterprises, the roadmaps presented at recent NonStop events all show just how powerful a role NonStop will play as part of the infrastructure supporting today’s private clouds and, at some point in the not too distant future, public clouds as well. And with that, and with the spotlight now shining as intensely as it is on HPE, NonStop is really standing out illuminated for all to see and that is good news for all who have embraced NonStop technology for more than forty years!