Under par: HPE 3PAR US sales are limping

Tech savvy customers

I wonder if HP* will realise that their customers are tech savvy and when they read in the news that they have 'optimised' or whatever the BS bingo word is for "laying off" a large portion of their engineering team for the product, then they get worried about the long term support impact and product roadmap.

Oddly enough, I had until that point recommended a couple of fairly chunky 3PAR arrays as the storage tier in a new project, but as soon as that announcement came out, we dropped them and went to our alternative shortlisted vendor, this had the effect of taking all the servers, backup, network, PS and maintenance agreements with it to keep everything in support with one vendor, so now HP will get nothing.

Hopefully things can get better now the captain of the boat is changing, unless she realised that its now just heading straight for the rocks.

and [we] are aggressively hiring more storage specialists for the field."

In my part of the USA, it appears that HP just wiped out a whole chunk of storage engineers.

The 3PAR guys were riffed and they put some of the nimble folk in their place.

I've had 3 resumes to look at just in the last month.

3PAR - the system that took the Australian tax office offline multiple times for weeks on end.

yeah, I can see people lining up to buy that from HP.

Disclaimer: HPE Nimble employee here. The opinions stated here are my own.

Providing some clarity: The sales teams were merged so everyone can sell everything across the board. Having Nimble, Simplivity, 3PAR, etc. teams separately functioning, with each only focusing on their own products creates pockets of efficiency/inefficiency, limits the engagements to specific products instead of the entire portfolio, and results in teams only selling products that benefit that team to attain their goals.

In actuality, all of the sales teams are excited to be able to have multiple products to sell especially when the competition moves into an area that a focused team has no product to offer. It's a bit of a learning curve, and HPE is a large company, so it's going to take time, however I can tell you from the inside, it is moving very quickly and as deficiencies are identified, they are being addressed.

All of the HPE products are good products, been competing against them since they were Compaq products. Everyone has glitches on occasion, not to minimize it, but name any vendor and they've had firmware, hardware, communications, etc. errors causing outages and losses. That's why systems are built redundantly, and even then gremlins figure out how to bypass the best laid plans.

Quite honestly, we love our partners, but if you're afraid to sell our products because of a news flash and go with someone else, best of luck to you, there are other good products as well, we compete with them every day. We would prefer you use ours because we believe they offer the most value and feature capabilities, and we'll do our best to make it a good experience. When theirs under performs, or doesn't offer the functionality needed, come back and see us and we'll help you out, no hard feelings.

Take note that we (HPE) have open positions for SE's in every region, as we speak. People rotate in this business constantly. Regarding the recent personnel changes, I'll provide my observation, we've seen that some: want to remain in startup environments so they leave on their own, do not like large enterprise environments and depart... it's just too big and not homey enough for some, some like being a big fish in a small pond and that's ok too, some positions overlap in areas and the personnel may not be interested in moving to new areas or the positions are no longer required -- can't have multiples of everything, or new skills are needed, and some may not have been producing -- I'm just speculating, and there could be any number of various other reasons. A company is not a charity. Just like any company it's a machine, the right tools and number of them are required and then as more or less are needed they adjust accordingly.

We're just getting it together, the Nimble and HPE union is still fairly new, stay tuned and watch the rest of the movie before completing the plot line. There are some surprises on the horizon.