One year later... still my dream job

Time flies when you’re having fun, but let me tell you; it travels at lightning speed when you’re living the dream! It’s been 365 days since that started, yet it seems like yesterday that I made my day one commitment to strengthen our focus on culture, innovation and our customers and partners. Four positive quarterly earnings reports and hundreds of new products later and the engineer inside me says the empirical results of this year indicate tremendous progress. Beyond my engineering background and tendency to look at this as a science, it is also an art. It’s more than just figures; it’s the people and culture behind the numbers. I am extremely proud of the work we’ve accomplished and even prouder of the team doing that work.

Every company needs a purpose, whether it’s making the world a safer place, or advancing the reach of the human race by landing on Mars. HPE’s purpose is to advance the way people live and work and our vision for the future is clear. We aren’t just waiting for what comes next, we’re defining what comes next.

We see the Edge as the next frontier, so it is our top strategic priority. The Edge is the world outside the data center. It’s where experiences happen—in stores, in schools, in hotels—anywhere technology gets put into action. We believe the enterprise of the future will be edge-centric, cloud-enabled, and data-driven. And we are proud to be the company who can best help our customers connect all of their data, wherever it lives.

 Throughout my first year as CEO, we took many important steps to further define our strategy and ultimately deliver on our purpose. Some of the things I’m most proud of include assembling an outstanding leadership team who are absolutely right for the mission ahead, and setting ambitious goals for HPE Next that we executed with precision. But most of all, I’m proud of the investment we’ve made in our customers, in innovation and in our culture. This year we:

Focused on customers: I started my career in HP(E) 24 years ago, serving customers in a call center. As a result, my passion for technology will forever be linked to my passion for customers. I know that through listening to customer’s needs, technological advancements can have a real impact on people’s lives. I’ve spent this year listening to our customers and partners, working to solve their business challenges together. We do everything in our power to arm them with what they need to be successful; be it a healthy innovation pipeline, simplified solutions, competitive prices, consumption-based models, or something else.

Doubled down on our commitment to innovation: We’ve returned to our roots of innovation, enabling employees to take risks, adapt fast, and push the boundaries of what is possible. This is critical to HPE’s success and we believe innovation and inspiration can come from everywhere - internally and externally. Here are a few ways we approach it today:

• organic: with a $4 billion investment in the Edge, new products, and cloud transformation. To advance this priority, our CTO, Mark Potter and I enhanced the patent incentive program, tripling the award for every application.
• inorganic: both through our acquisitions like BlueData, Plexxi, and Red Pixie to mention a few through and through strategic partnerships such as Alibaba and the Golden State Warriors.
• through our venture investment and partner program, HPE Pathfinder.

Invested in our culture: Making HPE a place where people are proud to work is a top priority. We have a new leadership team of seasoned executives who are dedicated to the company’s mission and culture, and we have more than 60,000 employees around the world working tirelessly to advance our purpose. Programs like HPE Gives (our global volunteering and giving program where we match our employees’ donations of time, money – or both to charity) give every member of our organization the opportunity to come together and make a difference. Celebrating together became a theme for us – from guessing which executive committee member was hiding under which costume during our Halloween celebration to helping Phil Davis as the Grinch discover his Christmas cheer during our holiday all employee meeting. Working hard and having fun is paying off. In the last year, we have made noticeable progress in transforming the employee experience, fostering active employee resource groups, investing in new training and professional development opportunities, and supporting community service engagements, all of which has resulted in improved engagement. Looking forward, I am excited to continue these new traditions in our brand-new, state-of-the-art headquarters in San Jose, which combines a smart workspace design with cutting-edge technology to enable innovation, collaboration and improved productivity.

Our financial results demonstrate we are focusing on the right things and are headed in the right direction. Not only did we deliver on the commitments I made for the company in my first year, we exceeded the revenue growth, non-GAAP operating profit and non-GAAP earnings per share targets we set at the Securities Analyst Meeting in 2017 when we outlined HPE’s strategy. We did all this while still returning $4 billion to shareholders.

I am grateful and inspired to live in a time of such acceleration and potential, and to work in a company where we can drive collaboration, leading advancements and using technology to help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. I’m also incredibly excited about the opportunity ahead of us as we return to our roots of innovation and invest in the future for our customers, shareholders, and employees. There’s a $140 billion market opportunity for Edge and a $185 billion for Hybrid IT and I strongly believe we are uniquely positioned to take advantage of these significant opportunities long into the future.

There is plenty of work to do, but I am proud to be a home-grown engineer whose latest engineering assignment is leading a proven, innovative company into the future.