Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, trading as HPE, is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Spring, Texas. It supplies servers, storage, networking equipment, supercomputers, software and services to businesses, governments and research institutions. It was created on 1 November 2015 when Hewlett-Packard separated into two independent companies, HPE taking the enterprise businesses and HP Inc. the personal computers and printers.
| Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company | |
|---|---|
| Type | Public |
| Traded as | NYSE: HPE; S&P 500 component |
| Industry | Information technology, enterprise computing |
| Founded | 1 November 2015 by separation from Hewlett-Packard; predecessor founded 1939 |
| Headquarters | Spring, Texas, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Key people | Antonio Neri (president and chief executive), Marie Myers (chief financial officer) |
| Products | Servers, storage, networking, supercomputers, hyperconverged infrastructure, software, financial and consulting services |
| Revenue | Approximately US$30 billion (fiscal 2024) |
| Employees | Approximately 61,000 |
| Website | hpe.com |
HPE's strategy since 2018 has been to convert its business from the sale of equipment to the provision of infrastructure as a service through GreenLake, under which customers pay for capacity used on their own premises rather than buying hardware outright, an attempt to offer the commercial model of public cloud computing without requiring customers to move their data into someone else's data centre.
History
Separation and early disposals, 2015 to 2017
The decision to separate Hewlett-Packard was announced by Meg Whitman in October 2014 and took effect on 1 November 2015. The reasoning was that the enterprise and consumer businesses shared little beyond a name, competed for capital on incompatible terms and were valued by investors according to whichever performed worse. HPE retained the servers, storage, networking, software, services and financial services operations and approximately 250,000 employees; HP Inc. retained the HP brand and logo, which HPE licenses.
Whitman led HPE and immediately reduced it further. In May 2016 the company agreed to spin off and merge its enterprise services division, which had been assembled principally through the US$13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems in 2008, with Computer Sciences Corporation, creating DXC Technology in April 2017. In September 2016 it agreed to spin off and merge its non-core software assets, including the remains of Autonomy, Mercury Interactive and Vertica, with Micro Focus, completing in September 2017.
The two transactions removed approximately US$20 billion of annual revenue and a very large number of employees, and were structured as Reverse Morris Trust arrangements that returned value to HPE shareholders without incurring tax. They also disposed of the businesses acquired during the most expensive period of the predecessor company's history, including Autonomy, whose US$11.1 billion purchase in 2011 had been written down by US$8.8 billion within a year and produced more than a decade of litigation.
What remained was a company of roughly US$30 billion in revenue concentrated on hardware for corporate data centres, considerably smaller and considerably more coherent than what it had replaced.
Neri and the GreenLake strategy, 2018 to 2026
Antonio Neri, an Argentine engineer who had joined the company in 1995 as a customer support engineer and had run the networking and enterprise groups, became chief executive in February 2018.
His central strategic judgement was that the company could not win by selling servers to customers who were moving their computing to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, and that it should instead offer the same consumption-based commercial arrangement for equipment placed in the customer's own facility. GreenLake, launched in that form in 2017 and made the centre of the strategy in 2019 with a commitment that the entire portfolio would be available as a service by 2022, provides capacity that is installed on premises, metered, and billed on use, with additional capacity held on site as buffer.
The proposition addresses a genuine problem. A substantial proportion of corporate computing cannot be moved to a public cloud for reasons of data residency, latency, regulation or cost at steady-state volumes, and such workloads had no commercial model comparable to cloud consumption. The difficulty is that converting equipment sales into subscriptions reduces reported revenue in the period of transition, since payment is spread over years, and that the model has grown more slowly than the company projected.
The company has also concentrated on supercomputing and artificial intelligence infrastructure. It acquired Cray Inc. in 2019 for US$1.3 billion and has since built the most powerful machines in the world, including Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which in May 2022 became the first system to exceed one exaflop on the Linpack benchmark, El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which took first place in 2024, and Aurora at Argonne. It supplies large clusters for artificial intelligence training to cloud providers and governments, a business of very high revenue and comparatively low margin because most of the value resides in the accelerators bought from Nvidia.
Other acquisitions have included Nimble Storage in 2017, SimpliVity in 2017 for hyperconverged infrastructure, Silver Peak in 2020 for software-defined networking, Zerto in 2021 for disaster recovery, and Athonet in 2023 for private mobile networks.
The largest was Juniper Networks, agreed in January 2024 for US$14 billion and completed in July 2025 after the United States Department of Justice sued to block it on the ground that it would reduce competition in enterprise wireless networking, where HPE's Aruba and Juniper's Mist were respectively the second and third largest suppliers behind Cisco. The matter settled in June 2025 on terms requiring HPE to divest its Instant On wireless business and to license the source code of Juniper's Mist artificial intelligence operations software, and the settlement attracted political criticism after reports of lobbying contacts, which the department denied had influenced it.
The company moved its headquarters from San Jose to a new campus at Spring, Texas, near Houston, in 2022, following a general movement of large employers to that state.
Inheritance from Hewlett-Packard
HPE carries the corporate continuity of the company Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded in a Palo Alto garage on 1 January 1939, and is its legal successor for most purposes, while HP Inc. retained the name and the logo under licence. The enterprise businesses it holds descend from a line of work that began with the HP 2116A minicomputer in 1966, continued through the HP 3000 and HP 9000 families, the PA-RISC processor architecture developed in the 1980s and the Itanium programme pursued jointly with Intel from the 1990s.
It also inherited the accumulated consequences of the acquisitions made between 2001 and 2011. Compaq, bought in 2002, had itself acquired Digital Equipment Corporation in 1998, so that the Alpha and VAX lines, Tandem's fault-tolerant NonStop systems and much of the minicomputer industry of the 1970s and 1980s pass through HPE's corporate history. Mercury Interactive, Opsware, 3Com, Palm, Electronic Data Systems, 3PAR and Autonomy were all acquired in the same period at a combined cost exceeding US$50 billion, of which a substantial proportion was subsequently written off.
The NonStop line, which originated with Tandem Computers in 1974 and which runs stock exchanges, payment networks and emergency telephone systems on hardware designed so that no single failure interrupts processing, remains in HPE's portfolio and is among the longest continuously developed computer architectures in existence.
Products in detail
ProLiant servers, introduced by Compaq in 1993 and continued by HP after 2002, have been among the best-selling server lines in the world for three decades. Current generations are built around AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors and, increasingly, around Nvidia accelerators for machine learning workloads.
Cray supercomputers, acquired in 2019, use the Slingshot interconnect developed by that company and are supplied principally to national laboratories, weather services and defence establishments. Frontier at Oak Ridge, El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore and Aurora at Argonne are among the most powerful machines ever built, and El Capitan, commissioned for nuclear weapons stockpile simulation, took first place on the TOP500 list in November 2024 at more than 1.7 exaflops.
Alletra storage covers block, file and object storage with a common cloud-based management plane, and descends from the Nimble and 3PAR acquisitions. Aruba networking covers wireless access points, switches and network access control, and is now combined with Juniper's routing, switching and Mist wireless management.
GreenLake is the consumption platform through which the portfolio is delivered as a service, with customers contracting for capacity, monitoring use through a common console and paying monthly. The company reports annualised revenue run rate for GreenLake separately, which has grown into the billions of dollars, and reports the number of customers, which exceeds thirty thousand.
Morpheus and OpsRamp, acquired in 2024 and 2023, provide multi-cloud management and observability, addressing the problem that most large organisations now run workloads across several clouds and their own facilities and have no single view of them.
Business
Segments
Server comprises ProLiant industry-standard servers, which have been the largest-selling server line in the world for much of the past three decades, together with Synergy composable infrastructure, Superdome systems for large single-image workloads and the Cray supercomputers.
Hybrid Cloud comprises storage, principally the Alletra line, hyperconverged infrastructure, private cloud software and GreenLake.
Intelligent Edge comprises networking, based on Aruba, acquired with the 2015 purchase of Aruba Networks for US$3 billion, and now Juniper, covering wireless access, switching, routing and network security. This segment carries the highest margins in the company and is the principal strategic rationale for the Juniper acquisition, which makes HPE the second-largest enterprise networking supplier after Cisco.
Financial Services provides leasing and asset management, allowing customers to acquire equipment without capital expenditure, and contributes steady earnings.
Competition
HPE competes with Dell Technologies in servers and storage, where Dell is generally larger; with Lenovo, Supermicro and Inspur in servers, Supermicro having grown very rapidly by supplying artificial intelligence systems; with Cisco, Arista and Juniper's former independent self in networking; with NetApp and Pure Storage in storage; with IBM in mainframe-adjacent and services work; and, fundamentally, with the public cloud providers, whose growth has come substantially at the expense of corporate data centre equipment purchases.
Its position is strongest in supercomputing, where it has no serious Western competitor at the largest scale, in networking following the Juniper acquisition, and in the hybrid arrangements that customers unwilling or unable to use public cloud require.
Corporate affairs
Antonio Neri has been chief executive since 2018 and chairman since 2023, succeeding Meg Whitman and Patricia Russo in the respective roles. The company employs approximately 61,000 people and announced a reduction of around 3,000 positions in 2025 as part of a cost programme.
Its principal locations, besides the Texas headquarters, are in San Jose, Fort Collins, Houston, Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin, which is the historic Cray site, Galway, Bangalore, Geneva and Singapore.
HPE has published environmental commitments including net zero across its value chain by 2040, and its equipment efficiency and the energy consumption of the supercomputers it builds are a material part of its engineering work; Frontier and El Capitan have both ranked highly on measures of performance per watt as well as absolute performance.
Assessment
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the part of a once-dominant company that retained the businesses its founders would have recognised as engineering, and it has spent its independent existence adjusting to a market in which the customers it served now buy computing rather than computers.
Its record since 2015 is one of disciplined contraction followed by selective expansion: the disposal of the services and software businesses acquired at great cost by its predecessor, the concentration on infrastructure, the purchase of Cray and Aruba and Juniper, and the attempt through GreenLake to change how infrastructure is bought. The results have been adequate rather than impressive, and the company's valuation has reflected the general market judgement that enterprise hardware is a business of modest growth and modest margins.
Its strongest position is in the systems at the top of the market, where the largest supercomputers and the largest artificial intelligence clusters are built, a business whose scale has expanded enormously since 2023 and whose profitability is limited by the cost of the components that make it valuable.