The Edge Propels HPE While Datacenter Taps The Brakes
The Next Platform, Wednesday, August 30,2023
Customers of Hewlett Packard Enterprise have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brakes at the same time that the company is transitioning from selling gear outright to customers to selling them subscriptions that spread the cost - and therefore HPE's recognized revenues - out over time.
That's why the quarter ended in July, the third quarter of HPE's fiscal 2023 year, had its ups and downs. But on the whole, HPE is managing all these transitions (and several more) even as its core ProLiant server business is in decline. Server buyers are worried about the economy and they are provisioning the capacity they bought last year and even with new processors from AMD and Intel, many are not eager to buy new iron. And shortages of components - namely, GPUs - have flattened revenues in its higher-end HPC and AI systems business, where HPE has had to focus on fulfilling its obligations on pre-exascale and exascale machinery to national labs in the United States and Europe.