HP Enterprise unveils brand, four-point plan

HP CEO Meg Whitman debuts the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo.

HP CEO Meg Whitman debuts the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo.

LAS VEGAS – It won’t officially exist for another five months yet, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise had something of a coming out party at the company’s HP Discover event here this week.

In an event-opening keynote, HP CEO – and future HPE CEO – Meg Whitman unveiled the company’s new logo and brand, as well as the four business opportunities it will pursue.

The new logo features a very HP-esque font for the text, with the outline of a green rectangle over top. The green, Whitman said, is the “the colour of growth, profitability, and sustainability,” and she showed a slide of tech industry logos, noting a sea of blue (including HP’s current logo), and not a lot of green, suggesting an interest in standing out.

The rectangle, she said, “represents the window of opportunity for what we can build together,” and together the logo brings out “the right legacy of HP and the exciting future ahead of us and ahead of you.”

Branding exercise aside, Whitman also revealed the four primary focuses the new company will pursue when it launches for real on November 1. There were few surprises on the list.

First, the company will address “transformation to a hybrid infrastructure,” a broad play that includes servers, storage, cloud and more. The play is “about getting better value from your existing infrastructure, and creating new value quickly and continuously from all your apps.”

Second up is “protect your digital enterprise,” the prerequisite security play, although Whitman pointed out that protection from risk means more than security, playing up the company’s backup capabilities. “The threat landscape is wider and more diverse than ever before, and no one can provide as complete an answer to those threats than HP,” she said.

Third, HPE will seek to “empower a data-driven organization,” its big data and analytics portion. “We’ve bet on open source, low-cost solutions that allow you to use 100 per cent of your data to make decisions faster and better,” Whitman said.

And finally, HPE will “enable workplace productivity,” which includes its mobility play, “delivering great experiences to employees and customers anywhere, any time, on any device.”

“These four transformation areas represent our view of where the market is headed. This is the heart of what Hewlett Packard Enterprise will deliver,” she said.

Underpinning the four areas of focus was the HP idea that any of those areas of focus can’t be addressed by any one style of technology. Whitman’s pitch here: the breadth of HP makes it the right vendor to tackle the big issues.

“We’re the only company that brings software, hardware and services. We’re the best company to build the bridge from where your IT is today to where it must be to succeed and thrive in the future,” she said.

Whitman also touched on today’s business market as what she described as “the idea economy,” stressing the lack of barriers for ideas to become realities in a world where IT and even supply chain can be acquired as services.

“Ideas have always fueled success, but not the ability to turn an idea into a new capability, product, service, or even industry has never been easier. This means that time to value is your greatest challenge, and your greatest opportunity,” Whitman said. “The days of needing millions of dollars to launch a new company or bring a new idea to market are rapidly coming to a close.”

HP Discover continues through the rest of the week, with a series of storage, cloud, and other announcements slated for the event, the last major HP-wide show before the company officially splits in two in November.