Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sells its software business
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Hewlett-Packard, prior to the spit, was a massive company with hundreds of thousands of employees and a portfolio that ranged from home printers and personal computers to enterprise software and hardware and more. It was huge.
HP, Inc - which went out in the split - does PCs and Printers. These are used by both home users and in companies. Did you know some printers get their ink from tanker trucks or are the size of a semi trailer?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the other parts which were targeted at big business (sometimes referred to as the global 2000).
HPE is now spinning out the Enterprise Services (ES) division and merging it with CSC. This was previously announced. ES is IT outsourcing. As part of that they write a lot of software. They are IT (bodies) for hire rather than product builders.
This latest announcement is the Software division. Software is written all over HPE. The Software division focuses on software for enterprises, such as Vertica, that is typically divorced from infrastructure.
The remaining part that's HPE is still pretty large and has servers, storage, networking, and a lot more wrapped up in it. All of which has massive amounts of software.
Hope this helps folks who are trying to navigate all the names and their meanings. I'll let others speculate on what all of this means and the motivations behind it.
I would assume stuff like HP-UX will stay at HPE?
With the Cloud Foundry stuff, maybe not. HP have two Cloud Foundry distributions, if I am counting correctly -- HP Helion and Stackato (which was a an early fork).
Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we are the majority donor of engineering to Cloud Foundry.
There has been some branding changes, but things are settling down.
Afaik Stackato is not too much of a fork anymore - but we have always had a single CF distros.
There is also the consolidation and cash payment to consider. All told the spinoff is probably cheaper than trying to buy the competitor.
It seems HP, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Box, etc. are all trying to build the future of business computing. Good luck with that!
Wasn't it over $1 billion for Autonomy?
Keeping a business unit on the books just because it generates cash is no longer considered to be the most optimal way to manage a large portfolio. This, and concepts related to an Advantaged Portfolio, are covered in some detail by the folks at Monitor Deloitte [1].
1. http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/s...
Does anyone know HP well enough to summarize what the "core" business is?
It's a shame that I can only upvote you once.
Looks like they are trying to create separate focussed companies out of it. This enables different companies to succeed or fail on their own merit. For example, the software company does not have to eat up the losses from the hardware company and vice-versa. This also enables the companies to partner with outsiders. For example, if HPE servers are terrible, the software company can now buy better servers from Dell or Lenovo. This would be hard to do before, as questions would be raised if a product company was unwilling to use it's own products. It can also integrate with products from other companies eliminating the so-called 'strategy tax'.
Disclaimer : I used to work at HP/HPE, but this is pure speculation.
Micro Focus is involved in the merge, a name synonymous with COBOL.
LoadRunner, Quality Center, and Quick Test Professional
It's actually pretty good software, just overpriced.
They would also have lots of software engineers working on their networking products.
Other operating system software than HP-UX would be VMS and NonStop.
> Micro Focus is involved in the merge, a name synonymous with COBOL
They also own SUSE Linux.
Seems MF has a knack for collecting antiques.
Before the HP/HPE split, we were at one point 320k people.
We do general IT outsourcing, we run and staff call centers, we build servers, we build printers (everyone knew that though ;)), we build software in just about every vertical you can think of, we run SaaS (e.g. online training and education platforms). Everything.
Disclosure: I work at HPE (or is it Micro Focus? My group is still a tad unsure - but overall we're not too worried either way).
It is not a coincidence that Oracle "lost interest" in Java EE - the whole ecosystems is a total disaster, the monument of bureaucracy, packer's mindset and human stupidity.
But it seems that NodeJS ecosystem is on track to outperform even this.)
As far as I'm concerned, the less software made by hardware companies the better. They suck at software, they don't seem to realize that it isn't "built" like hardware is, once it's out it's never updated. We all end up with computers/devices gimped by "value add" crapware.
Apple is the exception that proves the rule.