The 10 Biggest HPE Stories Of The Year

HPE’s Competitive Advantage: Partners

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri in 2019 accelerated HPE’s transformation as an edge to cloud Platform-as-a-Service powerhouse with big innovation breakthroughs like HPE GreenLake Central Service and the HPE Kubernetes platform.

“We’ve had a record, record year in terms of selling as-a-service and adding your value-added services on top of it,” Neri told partners in a conference call reviewing fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year results.

For the full fiscal year, HPE GreenLake channel sales were up 231 percent, he said. What’s more, the HPE GreenLake pay-per-use channel sales pipeline surpassed the $850 million mark.

Besides GreenLake, HPE delivered double-digit growth in strategic areas like Composable Cloud, where sales were up 47 percent; hyperconverged, where sales were up 25 percent; and high-performance compute, where sales were up 15 percent.

Neri pointed out that the focus on higher-value, high-growth segments of the market is paying off in higher profitability for HPE and its partners. He said HPE partners’ gross margin was up a whopping 300 basis points for the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, while HPE itself closed out the year with a 270-basis-point increase in gross margin compared with the prior year.

HPE is also seeing increased channel momentum with channel sales becoming a higher percentage of total sales, said Neri. “We have a big competitive advantage—which is you, our partners,” he said. “We are and will continue to be a partner-led company. That has always been my message to you, and that will not change.”

Here then are the top 10 HPE stories of the year.

Get more of CRN's 2019 tech year in review.