The future is now, and now is software defined, with seismic market shifts to a cloud based service consumption model on the cheapest bare-metal hardware supplied by a big brand low cost producer such as Huawei.
Don't believe me? - who in the year 2000 really questioned if e-commerce or online banking would ever take off?
Microsoft, Amazon and Google have more than proven "software defined and cloud are the future" with a combined market cap of.. $1.1 trillion – and profits that shareholders just love.
(Note to purists - I get that Amazon is not all AWS – but remember AWS spawned from the systems Amazon developed for its core business)
HPE is a box shifter, a dying relic from the past who made the wrong bets for todays world, who b---s--- about software defined and no cloud solution, wrap it up in marketecture terms that would make even the Mohamad Ali of b---s--- go red with envy. WHats HPE's answer to everything? Here is a box - its all software defined and cloud and fits beautifully into your 42U racks.
HPE will still sell stuff, IBM still make mainframes that originate from Gene Amdahls 1960s S/360 architecture, but that is about supporting the legacy that has a lomggggggg tail, not being a part of the future.
HPE won’t go out of business, it has too much cash which has swollen with Meg;s divestitures. They can pay the bills for a long time to come, HPE will just be sold to asset strip and maximize the value within the hardware IP and whoever buys will commoditize it like nothing HPE cold ever believe possible and then HPE will be no more.
The exec don’t care as long as they make money, the shareholders don’t care if they make a decent ROI. Customers don’t care as there is plenty of alternatives and choice and they want to ditch data centers – not build new ones. Employees care because it is their livelihood to support themselves and their family and up until recently people believed Meg & Co that the Kool-Aid was coming back which was a big part of her remit as she planned for the inevitable future.
So what are you seeing from her and the board? It is the REAL plan in execution - you just wern't infomed that this what was intended and the end game. Does that make her smart and respected by those in the know? Very. Does it give her a future, hell yeah as they are not looking to hire Mr Nice Guy any more, its all driven by the $. Does it give her integrity? Well thats a bit like saying Hilter or Stalin were just a litte misunderstood.
So either take action yourself or wait for the action to be taken against you. The tech skills market is far from saturated and you will have skills you don’t realise are of huge value to sell yourself with.
Fear and dependency hold people back, not opportunity. Good people have nothing to fear, those that have been hiding for the last however many years should, rightly be very very worried indeed.
Who knows, Meg & Co may well be your boss again in a future life, so better play nice!
End of.