HP (HPQ) has been busy since it divorced itself and spawned HP Enterprise and HP Inc. There has been more enterprise activity in the past month than in the past years, as the spun-out HP Enterprise (HPE) side of the tech megalith tries to make a more relevant name for itself.
HPE layoffs
First, Tim Stonesifer the CFO of the new HPE says that up to another 30,000 people will be laid off. The Business Insider reports these cuts will be focused on HP’s Enterprise Services Division, the consulting arm of the company.
During CEO Meg Whitman‘s tenure, HP has let go 85,000 workers with this latest round of layoffs. And they aren’t over yet claims CIO.com. Ms. Whitman and CFO Cathie Lesjak said that HP would lay off another 5% of staff.
Michigan lawsuit
More bad news as the State of Michigan announced it is suing HP. Michigan’s Secretary of State Ruth Johnson is charging HP with failing to deliver on a $49 million contract after 10 years, according to a press release from the state.
FierceCIO reports that the project was supposed to replace a legacy mainframe system that has run 131 Secretary of State offices. However, since 2005, and after $27.5 million was paid to the company, the state said that not a single promised function was delivered. In the press release she states:
I inherited a stalled project when I came into office in 2011 and, despite our aggressive approach to hold HP accountable and ensure they delivered, they failed … We have no choice but to take HP to court to protect Michigan taxpayers.
The state alleged that following a set of failed negotiations over the past few months, it rescinded its contract on Aug. 28 with a termination for cause letter. The article says the state argued, according to the terms of the contract, HP was supposed to provide support services for the state for some extended period of time. The state said that, instead, HP employees stopped reporting as of Aug. 31.
HP responded to a request for comment from FierceCIO with the following email statement: “It’s unfortunate that the state of Michigan chose to terminate the contract, but HP looks forward to a favorable resolution in court.”
HPE 3PAR
On the product side, HPE has updated the software that runs all of its HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage products to boost the performance of its SAN and other storage products an HP presser announced.
One of the changes to the HP 3PAR Operating System. HP has added a new feature in the HP 3PAR Priority Optimization software. Fierce Enterprise Communications reports that the software now enables users to set specific latency goals as low as 0.5 milliseconds in the hopes of ensuring consistent performance levels in multi-tenant environments. The intention is to boost the quality of service for improved application performance.
VMware support
For data protection, HPE also added support for VMware (VMW) vSphere 6.0 with VMware Virtual Volumes to StoreOnce Recovery Manager Central for VMware. The update also includes more granular recovery of individual virtual machines and files, simplifying data recovery.
With these changes, another Fierce Enterprise Communications article observes that HP is getting cozier in its relationship with VMware as the company unveiled new consulting and support services for VMware’s NSX SDN product.
There’s actually a laundry list of new aspects of the two companies’ partnership, according to the article. The partnership includes a variety of HP services and products that tie into different VMware software-defined data center and end-user computing products, but the networking aspect comes in the form of HP Network Virtualization Services.
The consulting and support services will be available starting in January 2016. According to an HP announcement at VMworld, the services were “designed to transform and operate the network when combining physical and virtual network resources, functionality and management to ready a network for virtualized cloud, network functions virtualization or SDI.”
HP plans to implement a novel idea by putting consulting and support services under the HP Network Virtualization Services umbrella to provide a 24/7/365 single place to connect with networking, virtualization, and NSX experts in the hopes of quickly resolving issues.
Security changes
On the security front, HP announced new enterprise security tools that can detect communications between malware and a remote server as well as uncover bugs in enterprise software using machine learning.
The first called HP DNS Malware Analytics, uses an algorithm to detect enterprise machines infected with malware by analyzing Domain Name System traffic between the devices and remote servers according to a FierceCIO article. A one-year subscription to HP DMA starts at $80,000 to analyze up to 5 million DNS packets per day. Frank Mong, vice president of solutions at HP Security, claims, “This solves the problem of finding an infected host that has been missed by anti-virus and endpoint security”.
HP also introduced HP Fortify scan analytics, machine-learning technology, as part of HP Fortify on Demand, which uses an enterprise’s app security data to improve the accuracy and efficiency of app security. This technology integrates into existing app security testing workflows, increasing the efficiency of the app security audit process and the relevancy of findings, HP explained.
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Color me skeptical but I’m not sure that HP is the best horse for VMware to bet on in their battle with former partner Cisco (CSCO).
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Wikipedia says an organization has jumped the shark when it uses an out of character gimmick in an attempt to generate new publicity. The phrase “jump the shark” evolved from a 1977 episode of Happy Days, in which Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water skis. The Free Encyclopedia says this gimmick strayed absurdly outside the original storyline of the sitcom. 
VMware (VMW) has jumped the shark. The virtualization giant now has its own anthem. The VMware anthem performed by The Viarengo Band is set to Steppenwolf’s 1968 hit Born to be Wild. The song was most famously featured in the 1969 film Easy Rider.
