It’s Sunday morning and I’m sitting in London Heathrow Terminal 3, on my way to HPE Discover. If you follow my blog, you will have noticed that my focus has been on Microsoft Azure, with this in mind, it I wasn’t entirely sure if HPE would see the value in bringing me to HPE Discover this year. However the legend that is @CalvinZito believes I can bring something to the table
It seems strange if not alien for me to be thinking about hardware, I have been decoupled from the murky depths of DAC cables, storage performance/capacity, servers and networking items such as virtual connect for over twelve months. Yes you still have architectural considerations in Microsoft Azure, however these are higher up the stack and are geared towards limits and quotas rather than hardware boundaries.
Meg Whitman has proved that she has the vision and belief to shape and change HPE. With the split into Enterprise and Ink in 2015 and the recent announcement that HP Enterprise Services will be acquired by CSC (Computer Sciences Corp). This leaves HPE as a global hardware and software manufacturer. I’m interested to know how HPE is adapting to the future of ‘hybrid cloud’ and how they are going to show value in a ‘commodity hardware’ market.
When you have a company that turns over $53 Billion dollars and has 252,000 employees, it’s a gigantic task to point the ship in a new direction.
Let’s see what HPE announce at Discover and what their thoughts are in an ever changing market place.
VMFocus 
Given the desire to have fewer vendors the CSC move seems very risky. Customers can go to Dell for a one stop shop even if they are buying VMware or Citrix or Veeam or Microsoft or (you get the point). They they buy a complete solution even if Dell is outsourcing some of the services to Partners. It looks like HP wants to just sell the boxes and walk away from the services and support. It will be interesting to see how the market takes this change.