Whatever happened to HP?

I sometimes have difficulty trying to remember all of the permutations of HP’s business transformation. I’ve written this post as an aide memoire for myself – I hope it may be useful for you also.
It is surprising that HP should undergo such a complicated reorganisation when for many years it maintained itself as a singly-managed company despite a chorus of those in the stock market to break it apart. My Figure shows the main spin-offs, acquisitions and dispersals:

• Before the split HP acquired Aruba in March 2015 to enhance its enterprise network business – useful in competing with Cisco, which continues to have a 50%+ market share;
• HP split itself into HP Inc. (printing and PCs) and HP Enterprise (now servers, storage, networking and associated software and services) – one of the first decisions of Meg Wittman’s term as CEO in 2014;
• The newly independent client device company HP Inc. bought Samsung’s printer business in October 2016;
• HPE created DXC by merging its enterprise services business with CSC with each taking a 50% of the new company; CSC had already spun of its US government business to SRA to form CSRA for $800m;
• DXC then offloaded the US government business it inherited from HPE for $984m, merging it with Vencore and KeyPoint to form Perspecta;
• HPE spun off most of its software business, merging it with Micro Focus and taking a 50.1% share of the new company in the process;
• HPE bought SGI, enhancing its HPC hardware business in September 2016;
• HPE bought Simplivity in January 2017, giving it new capabilities in creating Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) systems;
• HPE also bought Nimble, allowing it to get a leg-up in flash storage offerings in March 2017;
• At the same time the company launched PointNext – an organisation with 25k staff focused on delivering consulting, professional and operational services.

That’s a lot of activity for what was once a monolithic full-range supplier. as you can see from the links above I wrote about the consequences of most of these changes at the time. WIth Antonio Neri as the new head of HPE, it will be interesting to see if the combination of the diverse entities adds up to more than the previous whole.

It’s interesting to compare HP and Dell – their strategies looked similar up to the point when both spun off their US Federal services businesses; since then Dell has transformed itself into a fuller-range suppler through buying EMC and corralling its five associated businesses into a common stable, while HP has become a sharper arrow through its offloads and acquisitions. Despite spinning them off, HPE will need to have strong partnerships with both Micro Focus and DXC to maintain its strong position in the enterprise IT market.