HPE announced back in September 2017 that the regions (APJ, Americas, EMEA) will be eliminated. Also 80 out of 160 countries will be closed. Pointnext Advisory and Professional Services (formerly known as TS Consulting) will only operate in 24 countries globally. The purge of the EMEA and subregion layers has already started in November and is now continuing in January.
It appears that the external consulting companies that were contracted for the HPE Next restructuring were only seeing an EMEA HQ with several hundred people as pure overhead that needed to be eliminated. What no one understood was that the EMEA layer did not only consist of region management overhead, but also of central functions that delivered all across the region, ensuring critical mass on specific skills. Most are gone now. It was funny that HPE constructed a new EMEA headquarter building in Geneva, which was opened early September. Then soon after the announcement came that EMEA will no longer exists. The new EMEA Pointnext leader was also announced this summer, and now this excellent leader with his whole crew no longer have a job. This is a clear sign that HPE Next reorg came pretty unexpected to most.
It appears that the HPE Next process deliberately eliminated all of the EMEA leadership, only very few with strong personal links to Antonio Neri were considered for country jobs, the big majority of Pointnext EMEA management has been eliminated - I call this a decapitation of the brains who know how to run the business and delivery.
Despite the pledges that services are strategic in the new HPE, I take that with a grain of salt. HPE will only deliver predefined services and will stop most of the customized consulting project services. We clearly see the handwriting of the Cisco mindset all the new Pointnext leaders brought from external. No one seems to understand the consulting business. Customers who want a trusted advisor for more complex projects need to look elsewhere, HPE is no longer interested.
Some of the senior architects moved to WW position focusing on the global scope (good), other seniors, mostly >50 Years old are purged. HPE again reinvents itself like so many time in the past, but this is the first time that I doubt that it will come to a good end. It looks very much like HPE is prepared to become an attractive acquisition target for somebody else, i.e. Cisco or Huawei ?