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Antonio Neri and HPE Put Big Money on Edge

Antonio Neri and HPE are betting big on network edge. The new CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced in June that the organization was making an investment of $4 billion in edge computing. Neri’s investment is part of a big play to make HPE the biggest end-to-end computing structure provider on the market.

The money from this investment will go to fund a wide variety of products, services and initiatives devoted to edge across the organization. For an organization with over 30,000 employees, it’s a massive undertaking.

In order to execute successfully, Neri and his team also plan to take advantage of the work of Aruba Networks, a software company that HPE acquired in 2015 for $3 billion in a deal which Neri helped close. The company is a vendor of data networking for enterprises and businesses worldwide. The acquisition will prove useful as the organization seeks to expand its wireless management software, integrated security, suite of analytics tools and other Wi-Fi capabilities.

HPE separated from Hewlett Packard, Inc. in 2015 under the leadership of former CEO Meg Whitman, but Neri began overseeing innovative initiatives across the organization long before that. Prior to assuming the CEO role, Neri served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of HPE’s General Enterprise Group. He has also overseen HP’s Technology Services business, as well as HP’s Server and Networking business. In fact, Neri got his start at Hewlett Packard over 20 years ago as a call center associate. Neri stepped in to replace Whitman, who stepped down from her leadership role in February.

Edge technology represents a significant opportunity for HPE. HPE already has core competencies in the enterprise server market and a broad storage portfolio positions the company well to succeed should the investments prove a success. Better edge technology would allow the company to process data much faster, a capability that analysts and customers are eager to see come to fruition.

Neri comes from Argentina and attended both the Escuela Nacional de Educación Technica and the Universidad Nacional.