Antonio Neri, chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, took some time Tuesday evening to chat with ZDNet by phone after the company reported[1] revenue and profit for its fiscal fourth quarter that topped Wall Street's expectations, forecast this yеar's profit higher as well, and said it will relocate its headquarters from San Jose, California, to Houston, Texas.
"I will say we finished the year with a very strong performance," Neri told ZDNet, adding, "The headline is the fact that we returned revenue to the pre-pandemic level, which is the $7.2 billion that we just posted."
Neri has been steadily moving more and more product of the company to an "as-a-service" model, where products can be used regardless of where they are deployed[2], be it in a public cloud environment or in a customer's own data center facility.
Individual line items are a validation of that strategy, he said, such as the company's annualized revenue run rate of $585 million, which rose 11% from the prior quarter, and 30%, year over year.
But there are other, qualitative indicators, he said, that indicate Hewlett's approach is the right one.
"When you think about apps and data, you need to think about workloads," he said, "you have workloads that require an enormous amount of compute, where the compute and data need to be co-located, and that is a perfect example of HPC, and we are the market leader."