
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sells its software business - jonbaer
http://www.businessinsider.com/hewlett-packard-enterprise-sells-its-software-business-2016-9
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mfer
I work at HPE. To try and add some clarity here are some insights.

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.

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kev009
What are some examples of software that are getting spun out?

I would assume stuff like HP-UX will stay at HPE?

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jonbaer
I think the gem in all of this is HavenOnDemand but absolutely NO ONE has even
heard of it ... [https://www.havenondemand.com](https://www.havenondemand.com)
... it can clearly compete w/ Bluemix ...

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jacques_chester
With the Watson stuff, yes.

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.

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mugsie
HPE Helion == Suite of cloud products HPE Helion Stackato == 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.

~~~
jacques_chester
Thanks. Branding is hard.

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halpme
I work there and today's been utter chaos. Lots of meetings with upper
management and people wandering around confused. I came in to work in a new
position in a new team with a new manager. They probably shifted all the
people they didn't care about into roles where they would be unhappy and
eventually quit, as opposed to outright laying people off. Meg's mentality is
that basically any unit of HPE has a pricetag. I'm probably going to stick
around for a few months and quit if I can't transfer back to my old team.

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mathattack
I'm curious why they choose this method of majority owned spinoffs. What's the
rationale behind this financial engineering? Is it that the parts have better
multiples than the parent? That they can claim better optics by consolidating
the Earnings Per Share?

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bluetwo
I think this is a way to consolidate the whole Autonomy mess they started when
they overpaid for and tried to integrate the company.

It seems HP, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Box, etc. are all trying to build the
future of business computing. Good luck with that!

~~~
catmanjan
We're trying to integrate with some of the Autonomy stuff at the moment,
talking to HP you realize they know about as much as we do about the products
- I assume they got the products, but forgot to hire the developers who
created them?

Wasn't it over $1 billion for Autonomy?

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freestockoption
More like $11 billion :)

~~~
catmanjan
Yeah wow I was an order of magnitude off... I can't wrap my head around how
this is good business but I'm sure someone knows what they're doing.

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justincormack
It wasn't good business. HP are suing for fraud. However no they did not know
what they were doing. Probably still don't.

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cheriot
> a spin-off and merger of its non-core software assets

Does anyone know HP well enough to summarize what the "core" business is?

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honkhonkpants
Oscilloscopes, as I recall.

~~~
homero
Calculators I think

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agumonkey
Radios, but I still have two hp48 calcs, and they are as amazing as ever (the
reverse polish Lisp even had arrow syntax for lambdas.. How cute is that). I
miss this HP.

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simula67
The right way to think about HP is as a conglomerate : a company of companies.

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.

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kazinator
I've never heard of any Hewlett-Packard software other than BIOSes in HP PC's,
and firmware in HP printers, and of course HP-UX plus surrounding
paraphernalia.

Micro Focus is involved in the merge, a name synonymous with COBOL.

~~~
planteen
I worked for a few years on storage at HP. They had the EVA, 3PAR, and
Lefthand product lines when I was there. Though HP sold them as storage array
hardware, the primary expense was engineering the software, not the hardware.
The EVA was a storage array that originally came from DEC and ran a custom
RTOS. 3PAR and Lefthand both ran Linux. These were large, reliable software
products with big install bases. The EVA was over 100k units. I think there
were 60-80 developers working on the EVA across 4 sites at the peak.

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.

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ethbro
I would guess a lot of the Hacker News crowd has a bit of a blind spot when it
comes to Enterprise software utilization. A lot of the stuff, you only see if
you're in the IT department at an older company larger than a certain size.

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youeeeeeediot
I'm genuinely curious what endgame Meg Whitman is planning for HPE, she seems
to be divesting most of the 'E' in HPE. So just commodity
servers/bladecenters, storage and networking (half of which is already
rebranded Aruba)?

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karma_vaccum123
Keep selling stuff to keep investors happy...when nothing of value is left,
declare victory and leave

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eatbitseveryday
Many well-known CS researchers have left (the then) HP over the past 10 years
to other companies (e.g., John Wilkes, Hans Boehm, etc.). So, some people saw
early there were problems (though perhaps not due strictly to the recent
years).

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dschiptsov
Poor brainwashed idiots who have been hooked on these piles of unmaintainable
Java EE crap (impossible to replace), written by a legion of amateurs coders
from outsourcing sweatshops, which everyone is now trying to get rid of. "Java
- write once, run away!" is not just a meme - it could be seen.

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.)

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ricksplat
A lot of this seems to relate to their UK business - with the timing and all I
have to ask is this anything to do with Brexit?

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oneplane
Newsflash: when you make computer hardware, you're still going to make
software, because it doesn't work without firmware for those 10 different
processors and SoC's on current mainboards...

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outworlder
This is talking about Hewlett Packard Enterprise. You are thinking of HP Inc.

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ajdlinux
... HPE makes hardware too...

