Neri presides over first results and talks channel and servers

In his first set of results since becoming HPE CEO Antonio Neri has indicated that the vendor is working with the channel to continue to drive server sales.

Neri took up the CEO post at the start of this month with Meg Whitman moving out of the hot seat and he got a chance to update investors on the state of the firm with its first quarter fiscal results for the three months ended 31 January.

Net revenue for Q1 was up 11% year-on-year to $7.7bn. Neri indicated that it was enjoying some improvements in market conditions and pricing was catching up with increased DRAM costs.

"While we don't expect these rates of growth to continue given tougher compares in the second half of the year, the go to market changes we have made in our [indiscernible] portfolio mix have put us in a strong position," the HPE boss told analysts.

The firm started this financial year with a three pillar structure - Hybrid IT, which also includes the Pointnext services activity, intelligent edge and financial services.

The hybrid IT business delivered 10% growth with high performance computing one of the main drivers of that growth. The firm is looking to roll together its storage, networking and data center technology into a complete solution.

Intelligent edge delivered a 9% year-on-year improvement with the firm pushing its switches and Aruba ClearPass offering for secure network access.

When asked by analysts about how it was looking to continue to drive server revenues Neri mentioned it was putting the emphasis on services and working with the channel.

"HPE have already made available services offerings. So from the service perspective, we can help customers manage, those are patches and upgrades and also product upgrades modernization type of programs, as well as consumption based models with HPE GreenLake," he said.

"All those programs have been rolled out to our field and to our channel partners and we’re going to monitor that as we go along," he added.

He indicated that the growth had largely comes from price increases but there were some expectations that customers would start refreshing hardware.

"I think in terms of refresh, we’re still early in what we call the Skylake refresh that refresh has not been different in any other transition we have seen in the past, whether this spectra and meltdown issues, which are an industry wide issue. Right now, we don’t see any slowdown or any increase in demand. But as I think about the future and think about the performance impact to some of these patches could have on specific workloads, customer will have to think about how to cover that incremental capacity," he said.