These days everyone I know codes on a Mac. Most bulk order desktops I see are Dells.
I ask seriously, with no intention to troll: what is HP good for these days?
It's really hard to understand this from HN startup / open source / Go/Rust/NodeJS bubble but most of IT is enterprise and it's the reason why companies like HP, Dell, Oracle, SAP are making billions of dollars even though to average HN poster paying for any of their horrible products seems crazy.
Edit: and as somebody mentioned also selling all sort of server / networking stuff
Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.
But this is about HPE which is the company that sells Servers, networking equipment and enterprise "Solutions", not the company that sells computers and printers.
[1]https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/1489/is-mac-os-x-un...
HP spent a billion and a half dollars to buy them in 2010 and then immediately didn't seem to be able to do anything with it. They ignored needed updates while competitors got better every year. They didn't even seem to be able to actually sell the thing - I had a large client who wanted to upgrade to the latest version (more than a million dollars in licensing costs alone), and couldn't get anyone at HPE to return their calls to actually sell him the thing; after six months of trying to give them his already-approved budget, they gave up and bought a competing product.
Now they've sold it off to Micro Focus, who seem to be a company whose business model is milking dying software for support and professional services money.
HPE is an organization that has grown so dysfunctional that it's essentially incapable of operating. Somehow I doubt laying off 5k people is going to help that very much.
Though with ArcSight, there really is no reason it had to go this way. When HP bought them, they were the undisputed market leader in an extremely lucrative and growing segment that has continued to grow in the years since.
If CA is a like a trucking company that buys old but still serviceable trucks on the cheap, and then runs them into the ground without maintenance, HPE and ArcSight is like buying a Ferrari at top price, leaving it to molder in the woods somewhere for a decade, then selling it for scrap. Just a ridiculous waste by a company that has nothing going for it but momentum.
Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.
All of those products were good for their time, but they never really advanced.
As one small example, LoadRunner is load testing software. When writing load tests you use it in interactive mode, but it would be nice to actually run the tests from a server in the background. You can do this... but any errors will POP A MODAL WINDOW! Serious-fucking-ly!
Also -- you can not only run it on a single "server in the background" but to a whole slew of load generators if you like. You can take those same scripts and reuse them via BPM too. Even long in the tooth, it's still an impressive suite for its breadth of solution. JMeter, Selenium, etc really aren't in the same category as LoadRunner, and yes New Relic and AppDynamics are lovely, but give me Diagnostics any day.
How many HP employees liked HP's image for real (quality, engineering) ? They should spin off.
HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
Also look like companies like BAE, General Dynamics, Medco, and other fortune 100 companies, most of them are just text. How much do you think they paid for those logos? I mean literally anyone with a text editor can make one of these logos, but for branding it IS a 500k decision to make
I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.
http://dilbert.com/strip/1996-06-11
The ironic thing is that Lucent later adopted almost the same shape as their real company logo!
http://www.famouslogos.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/lucent...
I hate this kind of nonsense. You can't just get rid of thousands of people then say "efficiency" and retain full productivity. At a place like HP that's bidding on 8 or 9 figure deals, you absolutely can't function without a sizable bureaucracy.
Here's the key: when businesses develop dominance in a market, they get fat margins - and they often just 'hire'. It becomes instinctive to think that 'people create value' and so they hire. Moreover - VP's, Directors, Managers are all trying to build their status, and they 'push to hire'.
I worked at a post-startup-stage high-growth company, and my VP was given directive to 'hire 100 people'. Completely not driven by business needs, or project needs, or ROI. 'Just hire'.
There is sometimes good strategic reasoning for 'just staffing' up i.e. scrape all of the talent in an area way from competitors, be a 'real company' to validate the upcoming IPO etc.. but it's really perverse.
Google, FB, MS - all guilty of this. Regular companies just the same.
I'll bet 1/2 of finance today could be replaced by computers - or frankly nothing. 1/2 of Hedge Funds could just put their money in indexes, drop their staff and get the same results.
Large successful companies often spend billions on 'new projects' that are doomed to fail - one could argue that 'failure' is part of the innovative process, yes, but it might be more efficient to invest/partner with startups.
When big, lumbering companies start to wane, well, they can't afford all the graft and have to start letting go.
It's an odd cycle, and it's surprisingly not as directly related to productivity as we might want to imagine.
I once worked with a large internal marketing team of maybe 25 people, they did almost nothing. Nobody was really sure what they were there for. They 'did stuff'. They were smart, nice. But they were very irrelevant - and I took pains not to discount their effort, i.e. not realize that they were 'important but unrecognized' cogs in the wheel. No. They were hired 'for hiring sake' and 'worked' for the sake of 'work'. This is common. A lot of big, entrenched industries are like this.
Maybe so, but, being inefficient, chances that they'll identify the RIGHT 10% to cut are pretty low.
The thing is, they start by cutting front-line employees instead of the root cause of inefficiency: management and bureaucracy. It's best to immediately fire the managers that were hiring for the sake of status.
No, they can't. Organizations don't work that way. People don't show up to work literally doing nothing, they have some kind of workload that will go belly-up if they just don't show up the next day.
Yes, many organizations could be made much more efficient, through restructuring, automation, flatter management structures, etc. But it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to make it happen overnight, then a lot of the workload just ends up being forgotten about until the customer steps in the door and reminds you in such a way that it becomes critical. Trying to reduce the size of a company needs to be carefully planned and executed over time to do so without affecting operations.
Large sudden layoffs, which is to say large layoffs which need to be executed quickly, mean that the company doesn't care about the hit to operations, which means that there are cash flow problems or worse.
After watching HPE for a number of years my guess is that in a few months they'll add double or triple this number of layoffs to an offshore team.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/05/23/last-itanium-long-la...
They plan to containerize HP/UX and run on x64 Linux, that sounds to me like it's just a plan for a run out to EOL.
A very undignified end to a wonderful OS (BSDs aside!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
And I doubt that HP/UX was 5,000 people within HP.
Who's right?
Will MicroFocus retool their software support pipeline? I hope so, because I'm starting to advocate we drop all their software because their first line of support is utterly incompetent. For example, I had to submit a ticket recently about a product we use. On the form, I selected the closest option to the software we had, say Product X, though my exact product wasn't listed. My inquiry was extremely specific and could only possibly be about one thing. Yet the first tech just threw the ticket back at me asking "can you clarify what version of product X you're on?"
It made absolutely no difference what version of PRoduct X I was on, so I wasted a good 48 hours so far. Then I wasted another 48 hours educating this person on what the product I was using even did.
If you need enterprise support at this point with HPE/MicroFocus, you have to escalate your tickets immediately and act pissed off or you certainly will be by their inept first line because they make it rather difficult to actually get someone on the phone that knows their own products.
Edit: To be clear, this happens with everyone I've ever met that has to engage HPE software support. I'm genuinely curious if anyone has any positive experiences because I've yet to encounter one myself or by proxy.
[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4104846-dell-technologies-d...
I'm wondering what their strategy is going forward. Are they still in the cloud business or are they gonna stick to the hardware/server side of things.
Edit: I decided to share what the Carly purge was like. We all knew that on a certain day we'd have the layoffs. Walk into the office. Conference room doors had windows on them, they were all papered over. Conf rooms had lots of boxes of tissues and bottles of water. You'd sit at your desk and someone would come by and tap you on the shoulder. It was pretty miserable. After that experience I think they decided that they'd announce stuff like this but do it much lower key, not all on the same day and very privately.
Similarly, I started looking to leave my first job out of university when they started offshoring some of the engineer positions to Ukraine. They weren't laying anyone off in the US but it was clear that they were trying to hire more people in Ukraine, which might put downward pressure on the wage raises of the US-based workforce, so I started looking and got out of there within months. The offshoring never did quite work out for them though (turns out that it's hard to offshore consultants).
I think this usually factors into the number of people laid off. Yahoo did a pretty similar layoff in early 2016, after promising 15% cut in workforce. The number of people that left on the day of was much lesser, but an equal number of people left in the aftermath. My old team went down from 30+ to around 5 before hiring other people and building up to a reasonable size again.
Then they spun off the interesting bits as Agilent and decided competing head-to-head with other conglomerates in saturated markets was a good business plan.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/71kkr0/thank_you_...
http://fortune.com/2017/09/22/hp-hpe-meg-whitman/
She tried to be governor and I think ever since a few people have put her on a short list. At the end of that article, she seems to be portrayed as uninterested in the proposition.
I get the ire, but the world is a dirty place.
On top of this, one of their VPs made a hard sell of the position, which, didn't make me feel particularly comfortable so I politely declined.
This article didn't mention Arkansas, or Software positions at all. I'm curious in any SME's opinion if I've dodged a bullet?
IBM is also building up a cloud provider solution, in addition to Google, Microsoft, and Amazon's solutions. I feel like a lot of shops are pretty entrenched in AWS, and HPE is kinda new and seems to be pivoting a lot. Somethings got to give in that market, no?
Excellent resource for HP/HPE staff leaving the company.
