Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has promoted a 22-year veteran of the company to president. The move comes as HPE continues to sort out its businesses after a series of acquisitions, divestitures, and layoffs.
The new president, Antonio Neri, was most recently executive vice president and general manager of HPE’s Enterprise group, which sells data center servers, storage, networking to corporate customers.
Meg Whitman, who was president, remains CEO of HPE, which emerged from the split of the iconic Hewlett-Packard in October 2015. HPE (HPE) focuses almost entirely on enterprise technology while its now independent sister company, HP Inc. (HPQ), sells laptops, PCs, and printers.
Before the corporate divorce, Neri was senior vice president and general manager for HP’s server and networking units.
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In a statement, Whitman credited Neri with helping guide HPE through its acquisitions of Aruba, SGI, SimpliVity, and Nimble, and the sale of its data networking business in China. She said Neri, as president, will oversee HPE’s efforts to optimize its operations after divesting itself of some businesses.
Related: Bye Bye HP
Last year, HPE spun out much of its IT services business to an entity jointly owned with Computer Science Corp. Then, it divested itself of much of its software portfolio to SUSE in November.
Related: Meg Whitman Issues Warning About This Business
Three weeks ago, on HPE’s second quarter earnings call, Whitman signaled that HPE may also get out of the commodity server business because of its razor-thin profit margins. These are the types of servers bought in bulk by large service providers and cloud vendors, which typically demand (and get) huge discounts. Instead, the thinking is that HPE may focus on higher-end, and more profitable hardware.