HPE plans new post-pandemic operating structure to support business model shift

HPE chief executive Antonio Neri said Tuesday that company leadership will align under a new organizational structure that will better position HPE for the post-pandemic era. The company also announced the upcoming retirement of chief technology officer Mark Potter.

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The reorganization is tied to HPE's ongoing pivot to becoming a completely as-a-service company across all of its products.

HPE's strategy is to deliver IT-as-a-service, move to a subscription model and be an optimization layer for multi-cloud deployments. The transition will have more than a few moving parts. Going forward, Neri said HPE needs to accelerate its shift to an as-a-service company and optimize to execute on its innovation agenda.

"Over recent weeks, I have evaluated our organizational structure to determine the model that will best enable our execution and transformation," Neri said in a blog post. "The time is right for an organization where each one of our business groups, aligned to market trends and our own financial segmentation, directly reports to me."

Following the planned retirement of CTO Mark Potter, who also manages Hewlett Packard Labs, Kumar Sreekanti will become HPE's CTO and head of software. The new duel role is meant to align the company's innovation and technology roadmaps, Neri said. Meanwhile, the leaders of HPE's seven key business groups will become Neri's direct reports. They include:

• Tom Black, head of HPE's storage portfolio
• Pradeep Kumar, head of the Pointnext Technology Services business group
• Neil MacDonald, head of HPE's compute business
• Keerti Melkote, head of HPE's Intelligent Edge business group
• Irv Rothman, head of HPE Financial Services
• Pete Ungaro, head of high performance computing (HPC) and mission critical solutions
• Keith White, head of the new GreenLake Cloud Services business group

"Given the synergies and incredible collaboration of our labs and the HPC teams that deliver breakthrough innovations, Hewlett Packard Labs will now report to Pete Ungaro," Neri said. "This alignment will enable even greater focus and innovation in areas that are critical to advancing our HPC offerings."

Neri also said company sales leadership will report directly to him under the new structure. 

The company's "go-forward Executive Committee" include HPE's five global function leaders: Jim Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer; Alan May, Chief People Officer; Tarek Robbiati, Chief Financial Officer; John Schultz, Chief Legal and Administrative Officer and Head of HPE's Transformation Office; and Jennifer Temple, Chief Communications Officer. 

More HPE:

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• HPE falls short on Q1 revenue, with sales declines in compute and storage
• HPE puts Microsoft Azure alum in charge of Greenlake business
• HPE buys MapR, aims to extend portfolio for AI, machine learning, analytics
• HPE brings hybrid cloud-as-a-service to VMware customers
• HPE aims to make its product lineup as-a-service, updates GreenLake, unveils Primera storage
• HPE buys supercomputer company Cray for $1.3 billion