Image: James Niccolai
The head of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s cloud team is leaving the company in a reorg that will also see the creation of a new cloud division.
Two other top executives are also departing: Manish Goel, the head of HPE’s storage business, and Robert Vrij, managing director of sales for the Americas.
The changes, announced in a blog post Monday, follow the news last month that Martin Fink, HPE’s CTO and the head of HP Labs, will retire at the end of the year.
HPE was formed last year when the old Hewlett-Packard split in two, with HP Inc. now selling its PCs and printers, and HPE its data center products and services.
LIke its rival IBM, HP struggled to adapt to the new model of cloud computing, and its business was declining alongside sales of traditional on premises hardware and software.
Eight months after the split, HPE’s cloud business is a still work in progress. In January, it pulled the plug on its Helion public cloud services, to focus instead on selling private and managed cloud capabilities.
And now Bill Hilf, who’d been in charge of those cloud efforts, will be leaving HPE to “pursue other opportunities,” HPE said on Monday.
The company will move its Helion OpenStack and Helion CloudSystem teams into a new division called the Software-Defined & Cloud Group, to be led by Ric Lewis, it said.
“By bringing these assets together, we create a single organization tasked with a common mission – to provide best-in-class solutions that enable developers and operators to deploy their applications across traditional and cloud infrastructures, simply and effortlessly,” HPE said.
It positioned the news as a continuation of its announcement in May, when it said it would spin off its enterprise services business and merge it with CSC to create an IT services giant with US$26 billion in annual revenue.
