I've watched the slow-motion trainwreck that is HP and HPE though the lens of working with ArcSight, a very expensive and formerly segment-leading enterprise SIEM tool.<p>HP spent a billion and a half dollars to buy them in 2010 and then immediately didn't seem to be able to do anything with it. They ignored needed updates while competitors got better every year. They didn't even seem to be able to actually sell the thing - I had a large client who wanted to upgrade to the latest version (more than a million dollars in licensing costs alone), and couldn't get anyone at HPE to return their calls to actually sell him the thing; after six months of trying to give them his already-approved budget, they gave up and bought a competing product.<p>Now they've sold it off to Micro Focus, who seem to be a company whose business model is milking dying software for support and professional services money.<p>HPE is an organization that has grown so dysfunctional that it's essentially incapable of operating. Somehow I doubt laying off 5k people is going to help that very much.
Having previously worked at HP for 10+ years I can clearly state that HP is always in the midst of some layoff. After the first Carly purge of 2001 they decided to make it stealthy instead of big bang.<p>Edit: I decided to share what the Carly purge was like. We all knew that on a certain day we'd have the layoffs. Walk into the office. Conference room doors had windows on them, they were all papered over. Conf rooms had lots of boxes of tissues and bottles of water. You'd sit at your desk and someone would come by and tap you on the shoulder. It was pretty miserable. After that experience I think they decided that they'd announce stuff like this but do it much lower key, not all on the same day and very privately.
"she said she’s pushing to cut “layers” in the organization and become more efficient"<p>I hate this kind of nonsense. You can't just get rid of thousands of people then say "efficiency" and retain full productivity. At a place like HP that's bidding on 8 or 9 figure deals, you absolutely can't function without a sizable bureaucracy.
Why do people keep putting forth Meg Whitman for a possible presidential run? Obviously, even a baboon would be better and more consistent than the current POTUS but HP has such a terrible reputation and seems like it's always in crisis mode, laying people off, etc. not to mention they can't even keep a support page up. I guess she's making money for someone and those folks would like to see her in office but maybe we should stop thinking that CEOs are qualified to run the country.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_hp_for_your_great_printer_support/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_...</a>
You know, the thing that really gets me about these things is this: Most of the people getting laid off did nothing wrong; all most of them are guilty of is choosing the wrong company to work for. Meanwhile, the executives and managers are guilty of mismanagement, yet they're getting rewarded for doing this.
I worked for HP during their split. HPE paid some firm 500k for their new logo. Their logo is a green rectangle, something you could do in MS Paint in literally a second.<p>HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
This article says that HPE has 50k employees. According to Wikipedia, they have almost 200k.<p>Who's right?<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise</a>
HP Alumni resources:
<a href="http://www.hpalumni.org/index" rel="nofollow">http://www.hpalumni.org/index</a><p>Excellent resource for HP/HPE staff leaving the company.
Last year before I graduated, I was offered a very lucrative software engineering position in Nowhere, Arkansas. It seemed interesting, but in my 10$/hour opinion I had other goals for myself, and there didn't appear to be a community that would help me grow where they wanted me to work.<p>On top of this, one of their VPs made a hard sell of the position, which, didn't make me feel particularly comfortable so I politely declined.<p>This article didn't mention Arkansas, or Software positions at all. I'm curious in any SME's opinion if I've dodged a bullet?<p>IBM is also building up a cloud provider solution, in addition to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's solutions. I feel like a lot of shops are pretty entrenched in AWS, and HPE is kinda new and seems to be pivoting a lot. Somethings got to give in that market, no?
Maybe I'm just not as knowledgeable as the elite of the <i>hackerati</i>, but I haven't noticed HP doing anything relevant in at least 10 years.<p>These days everyone I know codes on a Mac. Most bulk order desktops I see are Dells.<p>I ask seriously, with no intention to troll: what is HP good for these days?
I have been contracting with HPE for some time now and I went through the HPE/HPI split and asset spinoffs to DXC & Microfocus.
I did not realize until now that HPE headcount had shrunk to the point where 5000 layoffs represented a 10% reduction in the workforce.
The cloud market is super competitive right now. HP tried to develop its own OpenStack based cloud but AFAIK it didn't turn out very well at all.<p>I'm wondering what their strategy is going forward. Are they still in the cloud business or are they gonna stick to the hardware/server side of things.