Since becoming CEO, Antonio Neri has steered Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) from a legacy hardware provider toward an AI- and networking-focused growth company. Investor sentiment has shifted accordingly: HPE shares have doubled since April, and earlier this month posted their best day since the company’s 2015 split from the former Hewlett‑Packard PC and printers business.
Financial turnaround and accelerating revenues
HPE’s recent quarterly report — showing a 40% year‑on‑year rise in revenues, profit numbers above analysts’ forecasts, and a statement that demand is so strong the company expects to hit long‑term financial targets two years early — was a clear catalyst for the market’s revaluation.
Activist pressure and Neri’s position
Elliott Management took a $1.5 billion stake in HPE last year and urged a change in leadership. Neri, born in Argentina, who joined HPE in 1995 and became CEO in 2018, says the pressure he felt was largely self‑imposed: as leader of 65,000 employees he set expectations for himself to deliver results.
The defining deal: Juniper Networks
Neri highlights the $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, announced in January 2024, as a transaction that redefined HPE’s market position. The deal faced legal challenge a year later when the US Department of Justice sued to block it on competition grounds. HPE engaged lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration; within six months the DOJ had settled its suit — an unusual reversal. Subsequently, 13 Democratic attorneys general intervened last October, questioning whether backroom arrangements had eased the transaction through with minimal conditions.
Neri is awaiting a judge’s ruling but argues the acquisition is in the public interest. He says he respects differing opinions while characterizing some of the debate as political.
Integration strategy and the role of culture
Despite the legal noise, Neri says HPE did not pause Juniper’s integration: the company completed the integration within five months of closing the deal last July and reports that joint Juniper–HPE teams have already produced innovations. Neri cites the Juniper work as an example of how to execute large acquisitions at scale.
Earlier purchases include Aruba Networks (2015), SGI (2016) and Cray (2019). Neri stresses there is no single playbook for integrations, but one constant has been emphasis on aligning company cultures rather than only combining business processes. For Juniper HPE created an integration office with four workstreams — general and administrative functions; product and strategy; sales; and culture — each led by a dedicated executive.
Rebranding as a cultural signal
Neri symbolized the cultural refresh with an identity change: replacing the old Hewlett Packard Enterprise logo and its green rectangular element with a simplified HPE mark that uses an open‑sided element in the “E.” Having worked as an art and design professor earlier in his career, he was closely involved in the redesign and hopes the element will one day be widely recognized by customers on its own.
Why AI shouldn’t be treated as just an IT cost
At a recent client event in Las Vegas Neri showcased solutions developed with Juniper. He acknowledged that enthusiasm for AI among enterprise customers has been tempered by concerns about cost — executives telling stories of token spending that delivered disappointing returns.
Neri argues businesses make a mistake if they isolate AI as an IT expense. If IT spend rises but total operating cost falls because AI boosts workforce productivity, the net effect is positive. He urges executives to adopt the idea of “the AI cost of the workforce”; HPE now evaluates its headcount cost through that lens. "When you deploy an AI agent to perform a task, it’s not IT; it’s the cost of the workforce," he says.
Concrete AI deployment and the internal agent Alfred
HPE says it has identified 1,200 distinct AI use cases and has deployed 250 so far. Automating processes helps improve productivity at a time customers expect faster delivery and investors demand higher margins. Neri emphasizes that the key value proposition for enterprise clients is time to value — how quickly technology produces results.
Neri also relies on an internal agentic platform called Alfred, named by his finance team after Batman’s butler, to track business performance. "Alfred tells me every day where I am," he says, asserting that AI provides a frank assessment of company performance without fluff.
Elliott’s role and the work ahead
HPE’s AI‑driven stock rally appears to have tempered Elliott’s activism. When Elliott partner Chris Hsu joined HPE’s board earlier this month he said the firm was encouraged by HPE’s strategic progress. Neri argues Elliott simply recognized what HPE’s leadership saw: an undervalued company with strong assets and upside.
Asked whether Elliott still wants a CEO change, Neri replied no one has told him that. He says HPE’s board has backed his strategy and him personally, but acknowledges there is more to do — you cannot fix everything in a single quarter. Analysts expect the order backlog and Juniper integration efficiencies to support sustained growth, but Neri believes the stock has further to run: "We’re still cheap compared to some of our peers," he says.
Note on supercomputers
HPE‑built systems occupied six of the top ten spots in the latest ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers — a legacy benefit from the Cray acquisition. Still, the top position was taken by a Chinese system called LineShine, which outperformed some US systems while using standard microprocessors rather than special‑purpose GPUs.
