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HPE is mulling 'tuck-in' buys of cloud firms, gros fromage says

Heavy lifting work done and dusted

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sat on pile of cash that will be used to fund “tuck-in” buyouts, with cloud services a potential hunting ground, the company’s number two has told The Register.

Antonio Neri, also exec veep and GM for the Enterprise Group, said the major structural work that has seen the PC and print units spun off, and the Enterprise Services and Software divisions offloaded, was “for the most part done”.

“We’ll continue to refine our portfolio through tuck-in acquisitions, M&A where it makes sense,” he told us, “obviously that [the spin mergers] gives us tremendous firepower”.

The sale of ES is set to complete at the end of March and the Software division by the end of next summer - the deals will add around $10bn to HPE’s balance sheet, taking the total to circa $50bn.

Neri claimed HPE is “doubling down” on software defined areas and the “cloud stack”.

The plan, he said, is for said the OneView management software to “move up the stack and with that momentum we’ll continue to add open source capabilities or make the right tuck-in acquisitions to deliver the full automation and orchestration that customers are looking for.”

Neri was the man that oversaw the $3.5bn buy of Aruba Networks which, unlike Autonomy, or some other HPE deals, has worked out rather nicely, giving the company greater oomph in campus and branch networks.

Perhaps he should play a bigger part in HPE’s future M&A activity, because the firm has made some pretty unsuccessful moves in recent times and spent the past half a decade trying to find itself again. ®

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