Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO Antonio Neri said the vendor expects the current memory supply chain bottleneck will continue into next year, but that customers are getting creative in adapting to its implications and that, luckily, those implications are not having as large of an impact across HPE’s now fully Juniper Networks-infused networking business.

Neri told investor’s very early during HPE’s latest earnings call that the IT market “is facing a sharp acceleration in supply tightness and increasing component costs,” specifically pointing to dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) and non-volatile (NAND) memory, and that HPE expects “elevated prices to persist well into 2027.”

As such, Neri said HPE has taken steps to deal with the lingering supply chain concern.

The first was a move to secure its current supply chain, a move that includes expansion of long-term, multi-year agreements with “key” silicon and memory partners “to secure the capacity needed to meet customer demand.”

Neri then said the vendor has implemented “an agile pricing posture” that means “price adjustments across the entire portfolio, with shorter commitment cycles.”

“We have amended our quoting terms with the right to reprice existing orders for commodity cost increases between quoting and shipment,” Neri explained of that move.

This somewhat led to the third move, which was expressing the planned pricing changes to customers and its channel partners in context of providing lead time and cost visibility, with a corresponding move to provide “alternative configuration recommendations to ship demand.”

HPE CFO Marie Myers later noted that this move in “actively steering demand” was toward “lower memory configurations where appropriate, particularly across enterprise deployments. With our strategy in place, we are dynamically passing through memory and component cost inflation while protecting our margins and preserving profitability.”

Neri added that this strategy so far has seen HPE repeatedly raise its prices “in November and then in December and then in January, and we have done it multiple times, and that's why our focus is, first, securing supply to meet the customer demand. We have the supply to deliver the output.”

Despite the constant price increases, HPE remains confident of ongoing demand.

“I met with a lot of customers … in Europe,” Neri said of a recent trip. “There was no one single customer that told me, ‘I don't want the product because now it's too expensive or higher price than I thought.’ All of them said, ‘okay, I understand the price increases. What we can do to shape the demand? Maybe a different configuration. Some may take a lower-end configuration to get the product, but it was all about speed to get the product, not the price.”

Networking not as nicked

Neri’s comments echoed that of other top network executives who have repeatedly noted market demand is outpacing pricing fears, though the HPE CEO did add that memory shortage was having less of an impact on the vendor’s networking business.

“Networking is more insulated with memory comprising a significantly smaller portion of the bill of materials,” Neri explained, a notion exemplified by HPE posting a 7% year-over-year increase in networking revenues when normalized across the Juniper Networks business. That new combined entity accounted for nearly 30% of HPE’s total revenues for the quarter and more than half of its total operating profits.

That networking growth was attributed by strength in HPE’s wireless data center, switching, and routing products, with Neri specifically calling out HPE’s recently launched MX301 multiservice edge router as having “a great start, with strong demand across all customer verticals.”

The vendor also noted a significant surge in Wi-Fi 7 equipment sales, where HPE saw more than 10-times increase in Wi-Fi 7 access points sold with devices connected to both our Mist and Aruba Central cloud platforms up 28%,” Neri noted.

That dual-connection model also highlighted HPE’s ongoing Juniper Networks integration, which Neri said: “is on track.” The executive confirmed that HPE had completed integration of its sales teams, with recent reports noting the vendor has doubled the headcount of its networking sales team as well as its channel sales reps. “Our focus now is to scale the organization while continuing to improve our overall sales productivity.”

HPE’s ability to navigate current pricing pressure is also bolstered by its Greenlake as-a-service platform, which Neri said is nearing 50,000 customers and is on track power AI-related annual recurring revenues (ARR) to $3.5 billion by the end of HPE’s current fiscal year “driven by strong subscription services across networking, storage, and cloud software and services.”

That sentiment was echoed by HPE networking chief Rami Rahim, who recently told SDxCentral that Greenlake was allowing operators to shift their capex and opex spend.

"We have financial services that can make it easy for our customers to buy either using either capex or opex models. We have full suite services that can do, build, operate, and transfer type models for our customers,” Rahim said.

From a technical perspective, Neri noted that surging networking demand was being driven by HPE’s differentiation in what it calls self-driving networks, specifically pointing to recent work the vendor oversaw at the 2026 Winter Olympics. That deployment included more than 4,900 access points, some 1,500 Ethernet-based EX series internet switches, more than 70 MX Universal routing platforms, more than 50 SRX firewalls, and more than 30 Smart Session routers spread more than 40 sites, some 15 venues, all of which are spread across three total regions spanning more than 8,550 square miles (22,000 sq km).

“The CIO told me, ‘I'm doing this with less than 20 people,’” Neri said of that deployment, adding, “and our team was very small, just enabling them to understand how to use these AI technologies.”