Nexo is buying Vauld, marking more DeFi consolidation

3

HPE

Power Score: 74.21

Momentum Score: 26.0 (T-6)

HQ: Spring, TX

CEO: Antonio Neri

On Power

In the years since CEO Antonio Neri took over, HPE has reinvented itself through a commitment to turning the whole company into an "as-a-service" business. With a more focused remit, the company has grown its GreenLake hybrid cloud service significantly on the back of what it sees as a moment for "repatriation" of data. While the services business underpins the long-term "edge-to-cloud" growth strategy that focuses on "control over data assets," HPE's storage business is providing the free cashflow to capture the more cloud-native pieces.

The process of rediscovering itself has HPE building GreenLake into a true product suite , which it hopes will up the incentive for customers to buy into its existing storage offerings. In October, Neri noted that even data already intertwined in some combination of legacy and cloud infrastructure can become siloed and that HPE's opportunity was to unlock its value by using GreenLake's unified platform (and the storage and services products that feed into it) to accelerate transformation. Its storage business now also includes more data management and protection capabilities, thanks to the Zerto acquisition this past summer, which the company hopes adds another layer of differentiation, at least in the cloud services part of its business. But as the company positions itself as a " true alternative to a public cloud " by selling up the stack, it faces one of the paradoxical challenges of the hybrid cloud market: It has to argue against the costly service bundling done by public cloud vendors in the name of repatriation while still offering enough packaged services and storage flexibility to avoid functionality dropoff if and when a client does make a hybrid transition.

On Disruption

The company says its as-a-service model and its third party sales are " years ahead " of competitor Dell, and a slight uptick in storage revenue after six straight quarters of decline indicates the transition to the new as-a-service pricing model is paying off, even if the company still has another year before the transition is fully realized. Still, detractors of the company's traditional storage business would say that, despite Neri's note that GreenLake is " on fire, " it's really the house around them that's ablaze, given the company's overall flat revenue trend.

Tea Leaves

In August, Neri announced some changes to the structure of GreenLake, separating a Cloud Services Solutions arm from the Cloud Services Commercial Business. The teams, now led by Vishal Lall and Keith White respectively, have a lofty goal ahead of them: They need to grow GreenLake more broadly to the point that it's synonymous with the HPE name or even eclipses it . One way that could happen is by bringing many of its functionalities even closer together, which the company has shown a penchant for through its recent Project Aurora rollout. Neri believes that Project Aurora, a zero trust offering that complements its existing Aruba Edge Services business, can do that by joining networking connectivity with the storage and compute businesses. And while much of the focus is on services, particularly in the cloud, HPE has also been working through hardware advancements to ensure each piece of the business can mesh together.

They Said It

" As we enter the Age of Insight, HPE is providing the ideal platform for organizations seeking to apply distributed data to fuel AI initiatives, deliver new customer experiences, and drive digital transformation." — CEO Antonio Neri in a May 2021 product announcement

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