Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said it will move its headquarters from San Jose, California, to Houston, leaving its storied Silicon Valley roots where founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the company in a Palo Alto garage in 1939.
HPE CEO Antonio Neri announced the relocation on the company’s fourth quarter 2020 earnings call this afternoon, and he also said HPE won’t layoff any employees because of the move. The company’s leadership made the decision to relocate “after listening to our team members preferences about the future of work,” Neri said on a call with investors, adding that the move will save money because Houston real estate isn’t as expensive.
HPE is already building a new campus in Houston, and that area is the company’s largest U.S. employment hub. Meanwhile, the company will consolidate several Bay Area sites to its San Jose campus, which just opened last year, and that facility will house its Aruba, storage, and software businesses. This will create “two very strong hubs” in California and Texas, Neri said.
“Let me be clear: our technological hub for innovation, particularly in Aruba, software, storage is in Silicon Valley,” Neri said. “This is our technological hub. Now for non-technical hub and jobs, we decided to move the headquarters to Texas because you have access to diverse talent and ability to attract and retain is unique and differentiated.”
HPE Q4 FinancialsThe move comes as HPE closed out its fiscal 2020 with Q4 revenue of $7.2 billion, up 6% from the prior quarter and flat compared to a year ago. The infrastructure vendor credited its revenue rebound to strength in its High-Performance Compute and Intelligence Edge business units, which performed well in Q4.
Intelligent Edge revenue hit $786 million, up 6% year over year with 10.1% operating profit margin, compared to 6.2% from the prior-year period. Revenue grew 15% compared to Q3. Also during the quarter, Gartner recognized HPE as a “leader” for the 15th year in its Magic Quadrant for wired and WLAN access infrastructure, and HPE closed its SilverPeak acquisition in late September. So while SilverPeak’s SD-WAN technology “had a minimal contribution” to Intelligent Edge revenue during the fourth quarter, “obviously SilverPeak will be more meaningful going forward,” Neri said.
Meanwhile, HPE’s High-Performance Compute and Mission Critical Systems revenue was $975 million, up 25% year over year. Revenue for this business unit grew 50% compared to Q3 driven by strong performance in Cray, HPC-Apollo and MCS.
While these emerging technologies performed well during Q4, its core compute and storage businesses declined during the quarter. Compute revenue dropped 5% year over year to $3.2 billion. And storage revenue fell 3% to $1.2 billion.
HPE continued making progress on its transition to cloud-delivered services and products as it works toward offering its entire portfolio as a service by 2022. It reported an annualized run-rate of $585 million for the quarter, up 30% from a year earlier. “We’re making great strides in our [as-a-service] offerings,” CFO Tarek Robbiati said, adding that HPE forecasts this software and subscription business will hit its growth targets of 30% to 40% compound annual growth rate from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2022.
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