As HPE Discover EU kicked off this week in Madrid, Spain, the conference discussion was initially focused on the news that Meg Whitman, chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. would be stepping down in February. The most significant action in her tenure was to split the legacy company into two businesses, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (servers, storage, networking and services) and HP Inc. (printers and personal computers).

“When she came on, she inherited a mess. It emerged from that split as a much more focused company,” said Dave Vellante (@dvellante, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

Vellante was joined by co-host Peter Burris (@plburris, pictured, left), and they discussed how the company balanced its size with a customer focus, HPE’s position in the market against AWS, and the image it has crafted for Wall Street.

Renewed customer focus has been key

Before the company split into two businesses in 2015, HP was viewed as a large but troubled firm. Previous leadership had tried to move HP more toward the software side through acquisitions, but the new model seemed to alienate its large customer base.

“That was probably Meg’s first good move, to step back and say, “Let’s not act as though size is its own virtue. Let’s stop the acquisitions and focus on what we have, which is this large portfolio of customers,’” Burris said.

HPE’s European gathering coincided with a major event held in Las Vegas, Nevada, by Amazon Web Services Inc. this month. Despite Amazon’s dominance in the cloud computing market, analysts see potential for HPE and other players to offer major competition.

“There’s no question that AWS is crafting the new look of the computing industry, but it’s not a complete picture,” Burris said. “There will be a play for multiple strong companies who are focused on delivering at the edge with great technology, great management capabilities, and delivering true private cloud.”

HPE will implement a new financial reporting structure next year. It will bundle its current business into three categories, encompassing server, storage, core networking and services into one, edge computing into the second, and financial services in the third.

“They are going to bundle much of their core business into hybrid IT [information technology],” Vellante said. “HPE is now saying this is the face that we will present to the street.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE