HPE’s Whitman Says Open to Cloud Deals With Amazon, Google

(Bloomberg) -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman is open to public cloud partnerships with Amazon and Google after a deal with Microsoft’s service provided a look at how she’ll try to navigate the market with a slimmer company.

In December, HPE teamed up with Microsoft to sell Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to customers as part of a new agreement. Whitman said the partnership is going well, helping land deals in places such as Germany. HPE said in October it would stop offering public-cloud features amid competition, while still providing other cloud services and products.

“We may do something over time with Google and Amazon,” Whitman said Tuesday during an interview at her company’s annual event, Discover 2016, in Las Vegas. “They are not enterprise companies for the most part. They may get there. I know that is their ambition.”

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Whitman is pushing ahead with new ways to approach a fast-changing industry that’s embracing some public cloud services first made popular by Amazon. She’s investing in potential areas of growth while exiting less promising businesses, making her company more nimble and able to react to shifts in customer tastes. Public cloud services let companies easily pay for outside computing power and storage via the internet from data centers run by providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.

“In order to be nimble and fast you’ve got to be smaller,” she said. “We had to get smaller to go faster.”

Last month, the company announced it will spin off and merge its enterprise services division with Computer Sciences Corp. in a deal valued at $8.5 billion for HPE shareholders. The agreement is part of Whitman’s drive to reduce the size of the company, which sells corporate computers and software, and free up resources to invest in newer areas, including the Internet of Things. The number of connected devices for businesses and consumers is exploding and HPE has the assets to find success in the market, she said.

“We’re going to be able to double down in IOT,” she said.