Hp does a lot of servers, switches, blade systems, and plenty of other Enterprise equipment. As well as all of the different management software that runs them. They are also a major open stack contributor.
Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.
Something tells me that even that will get a little shaky as the public cloud grows, unless they nab a contract with Amazon/Microsoft/Google to provide servers for their cloud services.
Enterprise. Basically horribly overpriced clunky systems for back offices of non tech companies. For example CRMs or any custom proprietary stuff, usually involving lots of Java and XML, integrations with other horrible enterprise systems from other players in the field like Oracle, SAP etc.
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
If you can't understand why enterprises don't just hire a couple engineers to rebuild everything in Go/Rust/NodeJS and save millions of dollars in enterprise software expenses, you probably really are in a bubble.
I can understand it. Just commenting on what I suspect is majority HN view. Lot of people here are from startups or from Silicon Valley etc.
I'd also like to mention massive waste of money in enterprise IT though. I have seen big enterprise companies buy licenses for products from a consultancy company which costs tens of millions per year and it never ends up being used ;)
Rewriting everything in a hipster / HN favorite language is obviously naive but there is a lot of money being wasted now in enterprise IT that could be saved and used more efficiently (like R&D and innovation). Enterprise is area ripe for disruption imho.
Not any non startup company I have worked at used GApps, only small startups. And bigger companies / corporations will use SalesForce, sure. But they will also be using another 20 other vaguely similar enterprise products. Sometimes different ones per department.
I don't doubt your claim, but what terrifies me about this if it's true is how willing companies are to give up all their data, security, etc for Google and company to mine, sell, etc. I would never do that. I just don't get that. To me it's insane to let others have and manage all your data. Doing god knows what with all that precious clear text data and and then not knowing who has access to it once it's in the "cloud". Just crazy.
There is astronomical waste, yes. But it's hard to put your finger on just what "disruption" would mean in this context.
A lot of what enterprise software does is manage complexity. Massive amounts of complexity from interdependent systems and 30 legacy customers with byzantine business rules and contractual obligations to use this or that data format on this or that protocol. Processes that involve hand-written paper documents that you aren't at liberty to change but you must somehow account for them.
Startups like to write new, shiny things. They like to "move fast and break things". They like to write a single "beautiful RESTful API" for their users. It's a totally different world.
When you work in the enterprise world, things like rules engines and BPMN and enterprise service buses and Java/Spring with its Factories of Factories start making a lot of sense.
I always bristle a bit when I hear "enterprise" used on HN. It's usually a pejorative, and I get the sense many people think it's just a bunch of overpaid consultants scamming a bunch of hapless dupes out of millions because they just don't know any better. Not accusing you of this of course, but there's an awful lot of condescension about the topic in general.
And then I hear things like "Oh you don't need enterprise software because you can use Gmail for your email now"...
typically its because in the past they fucked up and it was super expensive.
Move fast and break things is anathema to billion dollar enterprise where the mood is mostly "keep the money rolling in".
The higher end HP Z series workstations are incredibly solid and popular (if a bit pricy) especially among people running heavier engineering software or high end video editing. And everybody I know that needs a portable machine to run AutoCAD on has a Zbook.
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. The UI is horrible and not amenable to sufficient customization. Xfce, bspwm, and i3 are all substantially better from a user experience and getting-things-done standpoint.
2. The availability of tooling for basically everything other than graphics design or video editing is significantly worse than for Linux.
The availability of tooling is just fine. You may need to compile from source, but that shouldn't be a big deal. Otherwise there's also MacPorts, Homebrew, and fink for pre-built packages.
Someone above mentioned that they do defense contract. From what I understand, once you get something like that with the government, your pretty much locked in and get vast amounts of revenue repeatedly year after year. The government, can't just switch to another provider, because often times the provider needs to go through some big expensive review process.
Oracle is killing Solaris. At least HP has a recent precedent with licensing the rights to another OS (VMS) to a separate company to let its life continue.
My concern would be that as they look to carve off the less profitable areas of their enterprise divisions, that the HP/UX team (as a smaller subset of the overall quoted number of 5000) and in turn the HP/UX product as it stands at the moment, could potentially be marked to suffer the same projected fate as Solaris.
Agreed... although x86 port for Solaris from SPARC wasn't enough to keep Solaris alive and kicking, despite the huge advancements Sun had made with the kernel and filesystem etc.
God I hope so. The last time I touched HP/UX was 2001. I still have nightmares. It's a wretched UNIX. It was running veritas, another wonderful pos software.
It's a real shame that the last line of System V Unixes/ Unices / Unii is starting to die off. Market share aside, it's sad that the history of UNIX(r) appears to be coming to a close...
A very undignified end to a wonderful OS (BSDs aside!)
To clarify - I agree the BSDs are keeping Unix alive, however separating BSD from those Unixes with System V roots which are starting to wither and die is the point I was making - hence the (BSDs aside) addendum.
Wowowo, 195k employees? So many! Do they really make that much of money? What are the 195k workers for? Dell has way less as a whole company (even after the merge) [1].
Among other clients, HPE is a giant defense contractor supporting military hardware and software.
HPE also inherited HP's research labs, which Dell never quite had anything similar too, and medical division where they make a lot of very important medical/hospital devices.
ETA: HP at one point was much more similar to GE than Dell, and HPE is all the "fun" stuff that wasn't Dell-like. (The Dell like side is what got spun off into "new" HP.)
That is a very good question. I don't think I've seen anything other PR spin on the subject that felt like it couldn't make up its mind how soon The Machine may be productized.
Last I tried to read one of those PR articles (probably posted here to HN), it sounded like memristors still exist as active research, even though that was supposed to be the gamechanging basis of The Machine, but they are The Machine branding software projects now and non-memristor product tech that is kind of memristor-esque.
But again, that's merely my mostly hearsay-informed, lay readings of tea leaves.
(It's starting to feel a bit like IBM's Watson where the "brand" The Machine has multiple meanings depending on which team/marketer/sales-person/researcher you are talking to.)
What we knew as Hewlett-Packard is now broken up and part of several companies. First there was HP, Inc and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with the bulk of the employees at HPE. Then HPE spun out the Enterprise Services division (now part of DXC Technology) and Software division (now part of Micro Focus). Those combined were a majority of the employees. What you have left in HPE today could be 50k people.
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.
What you are describing is not new -- I was at an HP partner for about 5 years and it was always like that. One way around it was to buy into their premium support plan, where you got a named support contact. There were very few competent support people, but the ones at that level were solid. Secondly, yes -- the moment you put in a ticket, you also make a phone call and you ask for your ticket to be escalated. It also helps to call your sales rep and let them know you need support. Often that was the key, as they would put a lot of pressure on from the inside. I don't know the current MicroFocus world as well, but it was also possible to buy support contracts from partners like my firm, where those official support partners would also work to back-channel things for you.
If your issues are with the BSM / APM stack, shoot me an email I'll be glad to help. Also happy to refer you to MicroFocus partners that I trust and would use myself.
Well, that number is Jan 2017, so it at very least still includes the staff spun off into DXC. DXC supposedly has 170k but presumably a large amount of that came from CSC.
It shows the level of reporting these days the reporter in one breast says the CEO wants to cut layers of management from the global organization and the next press says 10% job cuts
It's just amateur
The cloud market is super competitive right now. HP tried to develop its own OpenStack based cloud but AFAIK it didn't turn out very well at all.
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.
Probably, the comment meant that OpenStack works best only in specific scenarios, like Private Cloud for Enterprises with strict compliance and regulatory requirements. Rackspace seems to be trying to do more in this area.
Their mistake was buying this cloud company, Attunity, for $11 billion, and then realizing the company had completely defrauded them with fraudulent accounting. They had to do a 100% write-off.
I know of 2 banks that bought an OpenStack private cloud solution from HP and even though they were over a year apart HP could not get it working for either one and had to change at least the hypervisor to VMware
Not that this is really any help, but an acquaintance of mine works for HPE and notified he was being laid off yesterday, and his last day is today. He was with HP (now HPE) for maybe 4-6 years.
How is it legal to tell someone they won't be working at their job anymore, with one day notice and presumably unemployment benefits considering it's part of a reduction in force? I would certainly hope that remains legal.
You are unemployed. You just have some money around for a few months (usually 3 months) to look for a new job. It's tough out there to get a new job, even senior engineers have hard time getting through interviews.
Our market (Sacramento, CA) is so hungry for senior engineers (for web or mobile), I'd wager max 2 weeks to be back in the saddle. But I doubt HPE has much talent for web-stacks, likely Microsoft/.Net and SAP experience which I can agree with your statement.
We just interviewed a PM from HPE and to our surprise, he makes ~$180k a year. We hired an awesome candidate for $80k.
And no, finding a job in 2 weeks is not realistically obtainable for a senior engineer. Try 6 months to a year. This whole 'developer shortage' BS I keep hearing needs to stop.
And besides, most employers' hiring timelines (from first contact to first day on the job) are longer than 2 weeks.
$80k is what we paid for a PM, not a senior engineers. We pay our seniors $120-$250 depending on how their domain experience maps to ours, and if you want to live and work in the Sacramento Area I can have you interviewed, vetted and on-boarded in less than a week. Being in Sacramento, we have lost talent to the Bay Area for top candidates coming into the state that want to work for a more known entity and a have a larger network work within.
No BS or bad vibes; Just real peeps writing code and having fun doing it and always looking to add great people to the team because the demand is high and experienced talent is in short supply.
2 weeks for a job is pretty tough but not unachievable. I'm not the best engineer on the planet, however I've experienced probably a month into a job search there are some solid offers on the table. I'd go insane looking for a job for 6 months, at month 2 I'd feel there was definitely something extremely wrong.
Why wouldn't it be legal? Virtually every US state has zero notice requirements -- tell your employee that they are being fired, laid off or otherwise no longer going to work here, pay them what you owe them immediately, and you're done.
"Two weeks notice" is a social nicety, good for maintaining good relationships and status. If you don't care about those things, you can quit or fire on the spot.
The time frame is symmetrical - both employers and employees have to give 4 weeks notice (default). In my case, the US parent company decided on 12 weeks, probably to retain the software developers.
Note that depending on unions (rare in IT) and mandatory employee representation (Betriebsrat) for big companies, firing people can be harder, especially for long-term employees.
Is the 4 weeks on the employee side a social custom that can be ignored (it is considered rude to do so here but not illegal) or is it actually a law or contractual obligation? Can you quit on the spot if say you feel the work load is unreasonable?
No, it's by law. You have a minimum of 4 weeks notice in Germany (some exceptions apply, for example you are hired for temp work). So you cannot quit on the spot, and your employer cannot fire you on the spot, unless it is for gross reasons on one side which makes it extremely unreasonable to continue employment.
Examples of this would be if you're caught stealing or harassing a coworker - or if your employer is breaking the law by repeatedly not paying you on time or endangering your health etc. You cannot be fired for being late once. Your employer has to document that he has told you "Do not be late again, or else" (and you have to sign off on this).
Work load may not be unreasonable. Usual work load is 40 hour weeks, and overtime is dependent on contractual definitions. Some people are (by union) not able to work more, others are exempt from overtime restrictions (managers), others will receive money or free time as compensation. You can enter contracts that specify a certain amount of overtime work, but unless they are specific enough, those clauses are void. You cannot get less than 24 days / year of holidays, you must not work on Sunday (unless: emergency or working in an exempt job, like healthcare), and employers risk fines/prison if they deny you those rights.
Overtime usually requires an explicit order, and is limited to 48h total work time /week. Anything more (for example: seasonal workers) needs to be compensated with free time in the following 6 months. So an employer can demand a death march for a project, but even that is limited to not more than 10 h/day.
That said, while the law may be on your side, people may work more than the contractually defined amount "because it's necessary / they need me there" or other strange reasons.
(note: there are exceptions for all rules. When your data center is down for some reason, you are not going to tell your boss "sorry, my 8 hours today are up, find someone else to restart those servers. I'll be back tomorrow.")
So if you're not allowed to give less than 4 weeks notice, what happens if you say "I am quitting in 4 weeks" then you come to work and do nothing all day, I guess the employer can fire you then?
You have a contractual obligation to do the stuff you're getting paid for, else that may be cause for a immediate termination (after being reprimanded). But of course no one expects you to go out of your way and put in overtime. During our last round of layoffs, the people leaving the company got ~2 months of free time and were told not to work.
On your last day, you (should) receive your letter of recommendation (Arbeitszeugnis), which by law needs to be a positive statement of what you have done, enabling you to get another job.
Slacking off in the last 4 weeks _may_ cause your employer to give you slightly less than a glowing review. Some employers take those letters seriously and if your last boss writes "he did the best he could with the tasks that were given to him", that's not going to reflect well on you.
edit: there is a whole "secret" language for those certificates of employment / recommendation letters, where employers may try to sneak in outrageous stuff ("He had an open ear for the concerns of his female coworkers" - grabbing them or being otherwise inappropriate towards them ), but since most companies do not want to haggle in front of a judge about the exact phrasing, it mostly is written in an okay way. Often you will be told: "Write this letter yourself, you know best what you did here, I am going to sign off on it."
I hate that there is such a double standard with this. Corporation can eliminate my employment at any time with zero notice and suffer minimal reputational impact. If I decide to quit right now and walk out of my office, I have to worry about long lasting reputational issues and "burning bridges". I get why it's like this, corporations have all the leverage, just hate that the dynamic exists.
I don't know if it's different on the east coast but I have never met a single person whose gotten any severance. About the nicest I've seen from companies is them saying "we won't dispute your unemployment claim"
From big companies? Which ones? And my limited understanding of labor law is that Massachusetts has more regulation on this sort of thing than most states.
Read https://www.thelayoff.com and typically any big companies layoff discussion will mention the severance package being offered.
I never experienced mass layoffs, just a slow removal of employees. Either outright firing, but one at a time, or some aspect of the job was changed abruptly and in a manner that garunteed people would leave. Those positions then wouldn't be backfilled. It's not doable on a scale of 1000s but it was doable on a scale of 30-40
Almost all of the Indian IT companies have a 3 month notice period. If we were to quit before that, we may not get the service certificate which would be needed for a new job.
At the same time, they can fire us (usually being called into HR room and forced to resign) at will. Even if there is any compensation, it will be 3 months basic pay (basic is only a percentage of the full salary).
Thus we get to enjoy the bad things of capitalism without any of the protection it offers.
To be fair, usually when companies lay people off with no notice, in these high profile layoffs, they will include severance (aka, a fat chunk of money).
It is possible that the employer pays for some number of weeks, but does not require (or allow) the employee to do any work during that period. But in 2017, I doubt it. If it's a big company in an at-will state, they just show you the door and say, "Bye. Good luck out there!"
The painful thing is being asked to stick around for a few more weeks or sometimes a couple months for a transition. That sucks, because you join daily standup, have tickets in your queue, but you have to pretend you care... Go to meetings where people just want to suck out everything from you, including your soul, so they can replace you. That's a nightmare, but many don't have a choice because they need to pay bills.
Because the company is usually offering some sort of severance, which will be withheld if you say "Yeah, no".
They're not saying, "you're laid off, effective today, but you have to stay for another two months", they're saying "you're laid off in two months, and your job duties are now to train your replacement". Saying "no" means resigning.
Because you get a runway to find a new job, you get a paycheck while you're on that runway, AND you get a severance at the end of the rainbow to tide you over if you haven't found that new job (or a killer bump to the savings/nice vacation/whatever) if you HAVE found a new job by the end. In addition to your PTO payout, or whatever.
Else if you flip your desk and walk out, you get your PTO and now you have no job.
No. Imagine a manager... you still have to maintain the team until you are gone. Otherwise you will get more angry emails and more angry calls from the upper management despite you are "fired". It's a torture, because you know your work isn't going to make big change anyway. If you like your team, you are there just to protect them...but that sucks... what a paradox.
I worked for HP during their split. HPE paid some firm 500k for their new logo. Their logo is a green rectangle, something you could do in MS Paint in literally a second.
HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
99 percent invisible has a podcast discussing this issue with a designer who takes the opposite position. A main point is that a simple, reproducible logo is ideal.
> I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.
How is that an excessive one-time marketing expense for a company with an annual revenue of $50 billion? That's 0.001% of revenue and is just a drop in the overall marketing budget. Engineers are quick to dismiss marketing and sales, but the reality is they are critical to any business. As much as we would like, technically superior products do not just sell themselves. It is especially funny because advertising is the bread and butter of two of the largest tech companies, Facebook and Google. As another poster said, this is creating a brand, not just a logo.
I guarantee you, it was extremely hard to produce. $10k for three initial designs, $150k for dozens of meetings gaining approval from twelve tiers of managers, $50k to consolidate and synthesize hours of feedback from everyone and their nephew, $10k to fly out and present to the CEO, another $200k over again to scrap it all and re-do it from scratch, and then $80k to figure out how to get something that will not be vetoed by the 2,000 people who have involved themselves in the process.
A green rectangle is pretty much the only thing that can survive that meatgrinder.
I agree the logo is bland and lame, but 500k for a firm to develop their new 'eye catching' identity seems roughly fair. They didn't pay 500k for a rectangle, they paid 500k for essentially a new brand, and picked the lamest one (imo)
Also look like companies like BAE, General Dynamics, Medco, and other fortune 100 companies, most of them are just text. How much do you think they paid for those logos? I mean literally anyone with a text editor can make one of these logos, but for branding it IS a 500k decision to make
Worked at HP 2000-2005, and we received detailed branding explanations. It was quite eye-opening, to me. Global markets, cultural meanings, etc. A lot of thought and legal review goes into it.
According to my direct manager, HPE's management structure is going to be the hardest hit with these layoffs. I think she used the term "streamline" to describe what they're trying to do with the management structure.
I would love it if one of the Fortune 500 companies heeded HN advise and get their next logo from 99 Designs, spending 50$ on it and the invested millions in applying it everywhere.
My assumption is that the firm(s) being paid for something like that have direct ties to management. Whether it's close friends or family members being thrown a huge bone, and, in some cases, having some of that money come back to the decision-makers through another channel.
"she said she’s pushing to cut “layers” in the organization and become more efficient"
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.
Bingo. YMMV, but in my experience the majority of inefficiency is caused by middle managers who are too busy trying to "win" political capital or burn down perceived enemies.
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.
Sadly, there is another economic reality: most good businesses are actually very inefficient and could cut 10% without missing a heartbeat.
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.
Certainly there's inefficiency in any human endeavor, but just cutting staff is unlikely to solve it. At least, not if you're doing it proactively to save money. Sometimes you need redundant roles just to make sure someone is paying attention to details that might get lost.
Don't you mean 100% of all hedge funds could drop their money in index funds and get better results? That's the way I interpreted the outcome of the Buffet bet.
There are black swan funds like Renaissance Technologies that routinely beat the averages by 30 or more percent, year after year. You can count the number of hedge funds that do that on one hand, however.
That'd be true if all hedge funds were actually trying to just beat the S&P. The vast majority, however, aren't trying to do that all; they're trying to create different risk/return profiles than you get by just indexing large-cap US companies.
> VP's, Directors, Managers are all trying to build their status, and they 'push to hire'.
> When big, lumbering companies start to wane, well, they can't afford all the graft and have to start letting go.
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.
By the time a company needs to do 'layoffs' it's usually way too late.
HP is a dinosaur. They are just a machine that was setup, doing whatever they did before, and won't really be able to change.
Because they are in tech, it's unlikely they will be able to 'turn around' - it's too competitive.
Maybe KMart or Sears maybe under the right management could have turned around. Maybe. A cracker company. An insurer. But not HP. What are they going to do, AI?
And I don't mean 'strategic layoffs' - like MS has done - that's just somewhat ruthless restructuring.
I don't see how IBM or HP truly recover.
One interesting addition may be Cisco, someday. Not yet though.
> most good businesses are actually very inefficient and could cut 10% without missing a heartbeat
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.
" People don't show up to work literally doing nothing, "
50% of what people do in large organizations is a waste of time. It doesn't matter how hard they work.
"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."
No. Not at all. Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable. It's not uncommon.
> 50% of what people do in large organizations is a waste of time
This is not the same thing as literally doing nothing. A waste of time is spending hours changing values around in Excel week after week for a report an executive will spend 30 seconds looking at (if that) instead of automating your job away. Literally doing nothing is taking long lunches, frequent water cooler breaks, and playing around on your phone for so long that your workstation auto-locks from lack of activity.
> Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable.
No corporate raider cuts slack and achieves profitability overnight. A few weeks, maybe, but overnight? No. Especially not in an era where automation infrastructure can't be built overnight.
It's such a tired trope. Nonetheless I believe it can work that way in some cases. But in HP/HPE's case I don't believe that for a second - in their case it's just a tired trope.
Having previously worked at HP for 10+ years I can clearly state that HP is always in the midst of some layoff. After the first Carly purge of 2001 they decided to make it stealthy instead of big bang.
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.
Wow. After something like that happened I'd start looking for a new job regardless of whether I was laid off or not.
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).
> Wow. After something like that happened I'd start looking for a new job regardless of whether I was laid off or not.
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.
The economy sucked in 2001 and I was in that weird position where you're in between new college hire and experienced (2-3 years). I tried looking for a job, it was terrible. I ended up sticking around.
What's really sad about this is when I graduated from college HP was a highly sought after place to work because they had a lot of "cool" products and prided themselves on never having had a layoff.
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.
I've watched the slow-motion trainwreck that is HP and HPE though the lens of working with ArcSight, a very expensive and formerly segment-leading enterprise SIEM tool.
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.
MicroFocus bought some other well-known software company in the last few years, right? Can't remember the name, but it was a well-known one. Novell or SUSE maybe?
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!
Actually, LoadRunner has gotten a whole lot of continued development over the years, at least compared to all the other products. I did some protocol work on it, Diagnostics, and RUM, plus have had semi-regular contact with the R&D teams over the years.
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.
Yes, there are updates, but it still handles errors with a popup msgbox modal, even in Session 0, where there's no one to click on it. There's even COM integration, but still popups!
This is a recurring theme with a lot of these types of large companies (Microfocus, CA, Compuware, BMC) they'd buy up companies with niche or larger products, and the products would wither and die. If not simply disappear. One of my long term side projects has been an editor for fixed length files that uses cobol copybook to map the files. A common use for this type of thing is editing/viewing ACH files. There was at least one of these for PC's, but disappeared into one of these companies a long time ago. Note I'm looking for beta testers if anyones interested (email in profile).
Definitely - CA is particularly bad about this; I've always thought of it as a killing jar for companies.
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.
Sometimes they don't want the product at all (or the employees). Rather, they're buying customers. I worked for a company that wrote logistics software and we got bought out by a much larger company. They stopped all new development on the product, laid off half the developers, and had the other half working on tools to transition customers from what had been our product to theirs.
Tax law used to facilitate this kind of thing, too, because of goodwill writedowns. Might still be true - I don't know.
As a counterpoint, CA purchased Rally (an agile project management tool and issue tracker) several years ago and they're been steadily improving it ever since. That's probably because there's a lot of direct competition from similar products such as Jira.
Frequently big companies buy others just to slow down possible competitors. In such cases, they don't really have a plan to improve the companies they buy, it is just a game of throwing money away to buy time. They do this because management is thinking short term, doing everything they can to improve their chances of cashing on big bonuses and increasing share prices.
I have been contracting with HPE for some time now and I went through the HPE/HPI split and asset spinoffs to DXC & Microfocus.
I did not realize until now that HPE headcount had shrunk to the point where 5000 layoffs represented a 10% reduction in the workforce.
You know, the thing that really gets me about these things is this: Most of the people getting laid off did nothing wrong; all most of them are guilty of is choosing the wrong company to work for. Meanwhile, the executives and managers are guilty of mismanagement, yet they're getting rewarded for doing this.
Why do people keep putting forth Meg Whitman for a possible presidential run? Obviously, even a baboon would be better and more consistent than the current POTUS but HP has such a terrible reputation and seems like it's always in crisis mode, laying people off, etc. not to mention they can't even keep a support page up. I guess she's making money for someone and those folks would like to see her in office but maybe we should stop thinking that CEOs are qualified to run the country.
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.
Well unlike corporations, governments have completely different pressures than the market. Being president is much different than a track record of strong corporate performance. Since the US is an oligarchy, its about being well connected, the ability to source and channel political talent, and represent the voices of the elites.
Last year before I graduated, I was offered a very lucrative software engineering position in Nowhere, Arkansas. It seemed interesting, but in my 10$/hour opinion I had other goals for myself, and there didn't appear to be a community that would help me grow where they wanted me to work.
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?
re: IBM, I'm not sure that SoftLayer/bluemix is getting a lot of traction. AWS: IMO they are the leader to be defeated by the competitors, doing well, cutting prices, making it easy for devs. Google: have heard positive signals especially around ML. MSFT: don't know a lot but I heard they are going to let you run your own Azure on-prem. HPE as a IAAS provider? I doubt it
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadThese 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?
Your point of view is too common here, people only look at the consumer products and have no knowledge of operations.
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
I'd also like to mention massive waste of money in enterprise IT though. I have seen big enterprise companies buy licenses for products from a consultancy company which costs tens of millions per year and it never ends up being used ;)
Rewriting everything in a hipster / HN favorite language is obviously naive but there is a lot of money being wasted now in enterprise IT that could be saved and used more efficiently (like R&D and innovation). Enterprise is area ripe for disruption imho.
A lot of what enterprise software does is manage complexity. Massive amounts of complexity from interdependent systems and 30 legacy customers with byzantine business rules and contractual obligations to use this or that data format on this or that protocol. Processes that involve hand-written paper documents that you aren't at liberty to change but you must somehow account for them.
Startups like to write new, shiny things. They like to "move fast and break things". They like to write a single "beautiful RESTful API" for their users. It's a totally different world.
When you work in the enterprise world, things like rules engines and BPMN and enterprise service buses and Java/Spring with its Factories of Factories start making a lot of sense.
I always bristle a bit when I hear "enterprise" used on HN. It's usually a pejorative, and I get the sense many people think it's just a bunch of overpaid consultants scamming a bunch of hapless dupes out of millions because they just don't know any better. Not accusing you of this of course, but there's an awful lot of condescension about the topic in general.
And then I hear things like "Oh you don't need enterprise software because you can use Gmail for your email now"...
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...
1. The UI is horrible and not amenable to sufficient customization. Xfce, bspwm, and i3 are all substantially better from a user experience and getting-things-done standpoint.
2. The availability of tooling for basically everything other than graphics design or video editing is significantly worse than for Linux.
The UI thing is entirely subjective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS
And I doubt that HP/UX was 5,000 people within HP.
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!)
The days of paying vendors massive sums of money for an operating system are over.
Who's right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Inc.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
[1]: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4104846-dell-technologies-d...
HPE also inherited HP's research labs, which Dell never quite had anything similar too, and medical division where they make a lot of very important medical/hospital devices.
ETA: HP at one point was much more similar to GE than Dell, and HPE is all the "fun" stuff that wasn't Dell-like. (The Dell like side is what got spun off into "new" HP.)
Last I tried to read one of those PR articles (probably posted here to HN), it sounded like memristors still exist as active research, even though that was supposed to be the gamechanging basis of The Machine, but they are The Machine branding software projects now and non-memristor product tech that is kind of memristor-esque.
But again, that's merely my mostly hearsay-informed, lay readings of tea leaves.
(It's starting to feel a bit like IBM's Watson where the "brand" The Machine has multiple meanings depending on which team/marketer/sales-person/researcher you are talking to.)
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.
If your issues are with the BSM / APM stack, shoot me an email I'll be glad to help. Also happy to refer you to MicroFocus partners that I trust and would use myself.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264922/number-of-employe...
It shows the level of reporting these days the reporter in one breast says the CEO wants to cut layers of management from the global organization and the next press says 10% job cuts It's just amateur
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.
We just interviewed a PM from HPE and to our surprise, he makes ~$180k a year. We hired an awesome candidate for $80k.
And no, finding a job in 2 weeks is not realistically obtainable for a senior engineer. Try 6 months to a year. This whole 'developer shortage' BS I keep hearing needs to stop.
And besides, most employers' hiring timelines (from first contact to first day on the job) are longer than 2 weeks.
No BS or bad vibes; Just real peeps writing code and having fun doing it and always looking to add great people to the team because the demand is high and experienced talent is in short supply.
* you shouldn't work for a job you are not going to be happy about (of course you can't be too picky)
* because interview sucks (numerous highly regarded engineers were turned down by big tech companies)
* because some jobs require you to move despite you like the job
Good for HPE PM though.
"Two weeks notice" is a social nicety, good for maintaining good relationships and status. If you don't care about those things, you can quit or fire on the spot.
Note that depending on unions (rare in IT) and mandatory employee representation (Betriebsrat) for big companies, firing people can be harder, especially for long-term employees.
Examples of this would be if you're caught stealing or harassing a coworker - or if your employer is breaking the law by repeatedly not paying you on time or endangering your health etc. You cannot be fired for being late once. Your employer has to document that he has told you "Do not be late again, or else" (and you have to sign off on this).
Work load may not be unreasonable. Usual work load is 40 hour weeks, and overtime is dependent on contractual definitions. Some people are (by union) not able to work more, others are exempt from overtime restrictions (managers), others will receive money or free time as compensation. You can enter contracts that specify a certain amount of overtime work, but unless they are specific enough, those clauses are void. You cannot get less than 24 days / year of holidays, you must not work on Sunday (unless: emergency or working in an exempt job, like healthcare), and employers risk fines/prison if they deny you those rights.
Overtime usually requires an explicit order, and is limited to 48h total work time /week. Anything more (for example: seasonal workers) needs to be compensated with free time in the following 6 months. So an employer can demand a death march for a project, but even that is limited to not more than 10 h/day.
That said, while the law may be on your side, people may work more than the contractually defined amount "because it's necessary / they need me there" or other strange reasons.
(note: there are exceptions for all rules. When your data center is down for some reason, you are not going to tell your boss "sorry, my 8 hours today are up, find someone else to restart those servers. I'll be back tomorrow.")
On your last day, you (should) receive your letter of recommendation (Arbeitszeugnis), which by law needs to be a positive statement of what you have done, enabling you to get another job.
Slacking off in the last 4 weeks _may_ cause your employer to give you slightly less than a glowing review. Some employers take those letters seriously and if your last boss writes "he did the best he could with the tasks that were given to him", that's not going to reflect well on you.
edit: there is a whole "secret" language for those certificates of employment / recommendation letters, where employers may try to sneak in outrageous stuff ("He had an open ear for the concerns of his female coworkers" - grabbing them or being otherwise inappropriate towards them ), but since most companies do not want to haggle in front of a judge about the exact phrasing, it mostly is written in an okay way. Often you will be told: "Write this letter yourself, you know best what you did here, I am going to sign off on it."
Read https://www.thelayoff.com and typically any big companies layoff discussion will mention the severance package being offered.
https://www.thelayoff.com/t/Plt3gwU
At the same time, they can fire us (usually being called into HR room and forced to resign) at will. Even if there is any compensation, it will be 3 months basic pay (basic is only a percentage of the full salary).
Thus we get to enjoy the bad things of capitalism without any of the protection it offers.
As it is, I think you do have all the protection capitalism offers.
They're not saying, "you're laid off, effective today, but you have to stay for another two months", they're saying "you're laid off in two months, and your job duties are now to train your replacement". Saying "no" means resigning.
if ($money_to_be_received > $aggravation ) { remain_here(); happy_whistles(); } else { say_bye_bye_suzi(); }
Else if you flip your desk and walk out, you get your PTO and now you have no job.
HP/E is way too bloated and IMO has very poor management. They have a nice patent portfolio, though.
I think in almost every situation you shouldn't be spending a half-mil on a logo redesign. That's super excessive.
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/negative-space-logo-de...
How is that an excessive one-time marketing expense for a company with an annual revenue of $50 billion? That's 0.001% of revenue and is just a drop in the overall marketing budget. Engineers are quick to dismiss marketing and sales, but the reality is they are critical to any business. As much as we would like, technically superior products do not just sell themselves. It is especially funny because advertising is the bread and butter of two of the largest tech companies, Facebook and Google. As another poster said, this is creating a brand, not just a logo.
I guarantee you, it was extremely hard to produce. $10k for three initial designs, $150k for dozens of meetings gaining approval from twelve tiers of managers, $50k to consolidate and synthesize hours of feedback from everyone and their nephew, $10k to fly out and present to the CEO, another $200k over again to scrap it all and re-do it from scratch, and then $80k to figure out how to get something that will not be vetoed by the 2,000 people who have involved themselves in the process.
A green rectangle is pretty much the only thing that can survive that meatgrinder.
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
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.
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.
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.
HP is a dinosaur. They are just a machine that was setup, doing whatever they did before, and won't really be able to change.
Because they are in tech, it's unlikely they will be able to 'turn around' - it's too competitive.
Maybe KMart or Sears maybe under the right management could have turned around. Maybe. A cracker company. An insurer. But not HP. What are they going to do, AI?
And I don't mean 'strategic layoffs' - like MS has done - that's just somewhat ruthless restructuring.
I don't see how IBM or HP truly recover.
One interesting addition may be Cisco, someday. Not yet though.
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.
50% of what people do in large organizations is a waste of time. It doesn't matter how hard they work.
"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."
No. Not at all. Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable. It's not uncommon.
This is not the same thing as literally doing nothing. A waste of time is spending hours changing values around in Excel week after week for a report an executive will spend 30 seconds looking at (if that) instead of automating your job away. Literally doing nothing is taking long lunches, frequent water cooler breaks, and playing around on your phone for so long that your workstation auto-locks from lack of activity.
> Corporate raiders since the 1980's have shown this. Hedge Funds see slack, they come in and buy the company, cut the slack and make it profitable.
No corporate raider cuts slack and achieves profitability overnight. A few weeks, maybe, but overnight? No. Especially not in an era where automation infrastructure can't be built overnight.
We don't actually disagree here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How many HP employees liked HP's image for real (quality, engineering) ? They should spin off.
I get the ire, but the world is a dirty place.
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.
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.