Spotlight Hewlett Packard Enterprise: Innovation from the Garage to the Cloud

Headquartered in Spring, Texas, with offices around the world, Hewlett Packard Enterprise helps businesses realize the power of their enterprise data. This means they engineer and sell all the computing tools, storage, software, and services to harness a company’s data from the cloud, as they say, to the edge, those people and devices at the very end of the network. Its flagship product is HPE GreenLake, an infrastructure software that powers ATMs, electronic payments, IT groups, and hundreds of other applications around the world. Known for its expertise in high performance, intelligent computing, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies work with HPE, adding up to 55,000 customers globally.

HPE GreenLake, credit: Hewlett Packard Enterprise

The firm’s roots go back to 1939, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard rented a garage, and in it, formed Silicon Valley’s original startup company. There, they built an audio oscillator machine for sound engineers, a product that soon proved critical to one very strategic early customer: Walt Disney Studios. In 2014, the year of HP’s 75th anniversary, the firm announced plans to split in two. Hewlett Packard Enterprise would comprise HP’s enterprise technology, infrastructure, software, and services businesses, while HP Inc. would contain the computer and printing systems business lines. HP Labs, the innovation thinktank arm of the company founded in 1966 by Bill and Dave to create a place for innovation that was not bound by daily business pressures, is part of HP Enterprise. Today at HP Labs R&D teams work on next-generation ideas, one project being to explore “trustworthy AI,” a future in which accuracy, equity, sustainability, privacy and compliance are built into the future of artificial intelligence.

Closer to home and day-to-day business, HPE’s innovation strategy is to invest surgically, in lock-step with its customers’ evolving needs, grouping projects into three broad categories. Horizon one is near-term products, horizon two is emerging opportunities, and horizon three is longer-term growth prospects. In 2020, HPE was named one of the top six technology companies for ethical business practices.

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