Definitely do that.
Okay. Thank you, thank you, everyone for joining. Tim Long, Barclays IT hardware, Comm Equipment analyst. Thanks for joining and happy to have Marie Myers here, EVP CFO, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so I think you gotta read a safe harbor first before we get into it.
Yeah, I gotta read a safe harbor, Tim. Yeah, you want me to get going?
Sure, go for it.
So, my remarks may contain forward-looking statements, so please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent Form 10-Q, for a discussion of the risk factors that relate to our business. Done.
Excellent. So thanks, Marie. Let's, you know, I've got a big list here, but I wanna start with kind of the three most popular ones we get, and obviously you guys just reported, so it's good we have fresh numbers and outlooks, but.
Yep.
A lot of focus on networking, obviously, with the Juniper acquisition and being, you know, half of profitability at this point. Much different complexion for HP as a whole. So, talk to us a little bit about, you know, kind of that growth expectation, I think kind of mid-single digit. Maybe the moving parts now, there's a lot of, you got campus, you got data center, you got telco, you got cloud routing, you got a lot of pieces. So maybe walk us through your view of, you know, kind of what's, what's gonna inform that number higher or lower when, when thinking about the, you know, the key end markets that you're playing in.
Yeah, no. First of all, excited to be here and obviously coming off a big transformative year. I think there's no doubt that this deal has transformed HPE into an AI-led networking company. And moreover, as you said, like 50% of our operating profit now comes from networking and about 30% of the revenue. So a very different company going into 2026 than what we were in 2025. In terms of what's sort of underpinning and, you know, driving the mid-single digits, I think what's really important. We'll disclose this obviously when we get to our Q1 results. We're now gonna look at the business in really four different segments. So maybe I'll take it segment by segment. So breaking it down by campus and branch, data center, routing, and security. And then we're gonna give you a split around service provider and enterprise from a customer perspective.
So I think you're gonna get plenty of disclosure in terms of how to think about the business and then, you know, how do we think about the customer profile. In terms of just what's underpinning the mid-single digit, I would add that in the earnings announcement, I did clarify for folks as we're going through the whole resegmentation, we did move out $300 million of, sort of, revenue into our corporate office. Those were businesses that we consider somewhat stranded that we took out of the networking segment. Going forward for 2026, we really anchored the guide around $11 billion. That's the number we're looking at in terms of networking. And, you know, thinking about that on an as-reported basis, you know, that's 65%-70% growth on a year-on-year or mid-single digits, as I said on the call, so obviously a significant opportunity.
I would couch it and say we're pleased with the performance that we saw in Q4, but what could tip that either way? You know, let me talk about sort of tailwinds and headwinds. You know, we are early days in the integration. I know folks are super excited about, you know, the numbers we posted, but we do have a really significant signpost in terms of the integration coming up in January. So we're in the middle of combining both of our sales organizations. So the first couple of weeks of January, we will actually go live with our integrated sales force. So by the time we get done with Q1 earnings, Tim, hopefully it will give you more color on how that's gone.
But we're being prudent because candidly, you know, integrating two sales organizations of the scale and the magnitude of these two companies is no small undertaking, and you know, for the most part, we don't have significant overlap, but there is a heavy lift, I'd say plenty of wood to chop in North America, so that's gonna be the one that we've gotta watch and thread the needle on very carefully. Now, obviously, we've done all the work that we need to do to get, you know, get in place the right sales plans, but still, in an integration of this scale and magnitude, there's just a lot to get through in terms of sales day one, so that's one of the biggest milestones in the integration.
Like I said, we'll be done with that by the time we get through Q1 earnings, so we'll be able to give you an update on how it's going, but I'd say that's one of the bigger, bigger integration milestones that could impact the performance of the business, and then obviously, I think you and I are gonna get into a breakdown of all the different subsegments and how they're going, but there's clearly opportunity in data center. I mean, it's one we're super excited about. We're seeing new opportunities that we never saw before where we can actually bid competitively together on deals that are bringing both server and networking in, so lots of excitement and growth opportunities on both data center routing, and then, I know we'll talk more about all the other segments.
Yeah. Yeah, actually my, my follow-up was gonna be on the synergies. Obviously, there's a heavy lift, as you mentioned, integrating sales force, but, and I think when the deal was announced, there weren't really revenue synergies.
Correct.
Planned at that point, but it sounds like you're starting to see opportunities. I know HPE had their own networking stack, but it was pretty small. So Juniper's, you know, pretty well-respected, you know, technology-wise in that area. So maybe talk to us about how you see that synergy, particularly for the data center switching. That seems like the most obvious. You know, you're selling a lot of servers, a lot of storage, not hard to try to bundle in the networking. So how is that, is there, is that like a separate timeline than getting the sales force, or is that something that can happen organically now?
Yeah, no, I think when we closed the deal, we were really clear that the deal was predicated on cost synergies, right? Not on revenue synergies. So from a cost side of the house, we did announce at the securities analyst meeting that, you know, we were going to see line of sight to $600 million, right, over the next couple of years, which I think was very positively received. And it's sort of like $200 million, you know, each year, $226 million, $227 million, et cetera. And we're well on track in terms of just the initial sort of out-the-gate cost work that we're seeing. From a revenue perspective, we didn't give any revenue synergies. So, you know, we said that we needed to get into the deal, into the transaction to see how that would evolve.
You know, what I would say, look, you know, if we start out with campus and branch, obviously, you know, I think Rami articulated the strategy there around how we're gonna integrate over time both platforms. So we're seeing, I think, good progress in terms of, you know, sort of layering in different capabilities amongst Mist and amongst our, you know, our Aruba Central platform. So on campus and branch, I think there's a fairly solid story. Obviously, we're number two in that space and, you know, we'll continue to obviously play and win in that market. The areas that I think folks are getting really excited about is data center. Now, obviously in data center, we're starting off a fairly low base. So there's opportunity there when you are coming into a market which is fairly nascent and new.
We just announced last week in Barcelona. Had some really exciting product announcements. We came out with our QFX, I believe sort of, you know, first to the market, liquid cooling, Tomahawk 6. So clearly, you know, putting our planting flag there in terms of being out early in the market with a product which I think the market should get really excited about. Frankly, we're excited about it. So opportunity there on data center. I think the other piece underscoring that is just the bids. Like we're starting to see for the first time, you know, the chance to actually bid on deals across both server and networking. So that's quite promising. I think the other one that's starting to get a bit more airtime is routing.
So, you know, this is a new space for us at HPE, but certainly Juniper brings sort of a beachhead capability here that I think is gonna be very promising going forward in terms of routing. And then obviously security, you know, just a significant market opportunity there in terms of zero trust. I think that market's over $30+ billion. Now, all of that today, you know, when we did guide the company and we reaffirmed our, actually upped our guide, for the business, for the outlook for the year, you know, we said all of that is in the guide right now, Tim. So in terms of EPS and revenue, everything's in there. It's a prudent guide. We've got some commodity headwinds against us. I think we're gonna talk a bit more about that.
So between where we're at in the deal and the commodity headwinds, you know, we feel like we've captured everything that we know. It's prudent. If we can do better, we obviously will, Tim.
Okay. Great, great. Yeah. We'll probably come back to some networking, but let's hit on a few others. You know, AI servers, I feel like particularly investor perception of this business has done a little bit of a yo-yo over the last two years. Initially, HP wasn't participating like some of the peers in the really low margin stuff, and then margins seem to have gone down even more. So maybe talk high level about the strategy with much more of the focus on, you know, some of the enterprise and sovereign opportunities, obviously being more careful about margin and working capital. So maybe just walk us through kind of your view of how you can play in, you know, your own way in the AI server world.
Yeah, no, so certainly as you said, this market has gone through its sort of trials and tribulations. I'd say we've stepped back and sort of come forward with a framework that we're using to manage that business, and I'd say we're really anchored around two key variables. One is profit and the other's cash flow and working capital, so you know, we feel as a company that we're really best positioned to win and play, particularly post the Juniper integration in both the sovereign and enterprise space, and I think we said on the call that more than 50% of the order backlog right now is actually a combination of both sovereign and enterprise.
So, you know, we see the service provider segment as being one where, you know, if there's a deal that'd be had that sort of makes economic sense, absolutely. But what we see from a customer perspective and company perspective is that we're best placed in those two categories. What I would say with the announcement we just made last week in Barcelona, we announced Helios, which is sort of scale up, both in terms of networking and server. What we see is that the sovereign folks really, from an architecture perspective, we have a chance with the Helios stack and with just our experience on the Cray side to really sort of position our architecture very well there. And the same to be said on the enterprise side.
I think both of our experience and our heritage makes such a natural winner in those places. And also from a profitability perspective, as a CFO, I'd rather see us play, frankly, in those categories as well. So we've made that intentional decision to be really intentionally focused on those areas. What I would say is with that, it does bring more lumpiness to the business. So definitely sovereign is a, I think we've said it in the past, it's a lumpy business. These large deals, they'll come into the pipeline, you know, they'll come into delivery and they'll move through. And certainly sovereigns, just by their nature, because they tend to be government-focused, et cetera, also have a different dynamic in terms of customer acceptance. So we also expect that that will impact the lumpiness.
And we said on the call that, you know, from an AI perspective, you know, right now what we see is those deals are very much more loaded in the back half of the year. So I think I said, you know, 46% of the revenue's gonna be in the first half, you know, the remaining will be in the back half of the year, similarly with EPS. So, you know, clearly this business is more competitive, does put pressure on your margins, but I think you saw our performance in Q4. We're back in the core server business, back in the 10% range, and we guided to slightly above the range for Q1.
Okay. And I imagine in the, you know, the non-sovereign or like Neocloud where it's, you know, more competitive, HP will still look, and if there's opportunities that fit the framework, then you can participate. It's just whether or not it fits the margin framework. Is that how to think of it?
That's the right way to think about it. Yeah. I think we're being very, as I said, very intentional around where we wanna compete, and those deals definitely come in. I see those deals come in, and obviously we look at the framework we've got, and if they apply, absolutely we'll go out there and bid against the business, but you know, we need to be very judicious around profit and around cash flow, and I think, you know, we laid out a three-year vision, you know, of a cash flow target and returning, you know, 80% back to our shareholders, and we wanna remain on track. That's our north star, I would say, in terms of how we think about the business going forward, particularly post Juniper. You know, we have, you know, we're very committed to our leverage ratio.
We wanna get down to 2x by 2027. So for me personally, as a CFO, cash flow and returning, you know, equity back to investors is back to our shareholders is super important. We wanna hit those milestones. We laid out at a Securities Analyst Meeting.
Okay. Great, great. Maybe one of the other topics, GreenLake and kind of the ARR and the whole SaaS type of model, it's gone really well, for HP. I, I think HP's kind of a little bit more at the forefront of that transition for the larger, hardware-related companies. So, you know, approaching 10% of revenues if you do a little ARR math. Talk to us about what you're seeing there, how, how you see that business progressing, and, you know, is there a ceiling or, or how should we think about the mix of, you know, ARR type business in over, over the total as we move through, you know, the next several years here?
Yeah, no, I think at the security analyst meeting, look, we said, you know, we hit $3.2 billion AAR for the year. Obviously, we got a significant lift there as we brought the Juniper business into the portfolio. Juniper is very highly concentrated in terms of SaaS software. So we saw all of those benefits flowing through into AAR. In fact, I'd say, you know, literally I think around about 80% plus of our AAR today is driven by SaaS and software, which is really where you want to be. By the end of the year, we said we get to $3.5 billion. It's obviously a nice growth trajectory continuing. And really that AAR is driven by both software SaaS and GreenLake. A moment on software SaaS.
Now what you're starting to see, I think, Tim, is just the benefit of both the Juniper portfolio, obviously MIST, Aruba Central as well, obviously got, you know, a significant amount of SaaS and software embedded in their businesses. But also just the flags that we planted over the last few years, whether it's OpsRamp, Morpheus, Zerto, all that software mix is starting to play through. Now what I really like as a CFO is that these ARR businesses obviously have a much richer gross margin profile. You know, certainly the gross margins we posted in Q4, what we're expecting to post in Q1, you know, they're this mix plays into supporting that gross margin. So clearly super important to us in terms of the revenue stream, but more importantly also just in terms of the gross margin profile.
As the businesses continue to evolve, we've got a strong focus in the company around ARR and driving performance in these spaces, then on the GreenLake side of the house, I think we announced 40,000 plus customers in this space, so we're seeing traction, and, you know, obviously customers, as we go through the AI journey, I think, are definitely, you know, looking to this GreenLake portfolio as one way to achieve some of their goals, so pleased with the progress we've made and continuing to keep it as a strategic focus for the company going forward.
And is this the type of area where maybe there's different sales compensation or incentives to move it along, or is that something that doesn't necessarily need to happen? It's still.
Oh, it does need to happen, Tim. Absolutely. Selling SaaS ratable revenue is completely different to selling product revenue. So I think for a company like ourselves, we've had a strong DNA as a product-led sales organization. So to get a salesperson to really understand how to sell software is definitely a shift. And we've had to clearly put the incentive structures in place in the sales force to ensure that the right incentives were there for them to sell this type of mix. Because if you're a product salesperson, it's a very different motion when you're out there. So yeah, it's been a transition.
I'd say Antonio has really driven this at the top of the company all the way through from everything you could imagine through to order management, through to sales, all needs to be rewired to sell with this type of mentality, and I would say that one of the great things I see with Juniper also coming over is Juniper had a really good sort of intuitive DNA around how to win in this space too.
Great. Maybe if we touch on kind of traditional enterprise and markets and we have to talk about NAND and DRAM and commodity.
I was waiting for that to come up.
Yeah, it's not a huge focus for me. I know it is for a lot of investors, but maybe just give your perspectives on, you know, call it DRAM for servers and NAND for storage, more or less. Is it passed through? What are the near term, midterm impacts, pricing changes? What's the strategy around a rapidly changing commodity environment?
Yeah, we're certainly entering a very volatile period of time here around commodities, and as you rightly said, both DRAM and NAND are sort of leading at the front in terms of what we're seeing out there now. Obviously, a lot of this has been driven by just the tremendous demand pressure that's been out there with AI, and the last couple of months, I think, you know, we've all witnessed some pretty significant price changes, in both NAND and DRAM, so in terms of what we're doing about it, first and foremost, you know, we expect, I would just say quite clearly, to pass on a lot of these increases in commodity costs to customers.
In fact, I would say we already started pretty early in some of the service space, already trying to get out there ahead of what we saw coming in terms of the market itself. so first and foremost, that's how we're playing in that space. Now, obviously we had pressure from tariffs over the last few quarters. so we've all learned how to sort of get out there and reprice in the market. so we're leveraging that infrastructure that we built on the tariff side. We had war rooms focused on pricing, focused on quoting. so we're just using those existing war rooms and practices to help us really manage through and navigate, you know, what we're seeing out there. so first is pricing, right? Being able to pass on the majority. The second is obviously demand shaping.
So using what we have and then getting out there and demand shaping in the market as the market continues to play out. So we'll, you know, we use those techniques. We've done it before during COVID times. We'll do it again in terms of demand shaping. And then I think, you know, obviously, you know, leveraging purchase commitments where we can as well. And you'll see that, you know, we expect to increase our purchase commitments on a quarterly basis as we file our disclosures. So these are all the different techniques that you use. It is a volatile time. I would say that, you know, we've got all of what we know in the guide as we can at this point in time. And, you know, it's just volatile. I'd say if we can do better, we will. We're trying to remain prudent, Tim.
Obviously, and I would just add that given that now the more than 50% of our operating profit comes from networking, networking is somewhat less impacted by this. So that's also good in terms of business mix from a portfolio perspective. It is really server first, storage second, and sort of networking third is the way to think about it in terms of impact. So as you think about our peer base, you gotta put that context out there too.
Right. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe onto storage. It's been pretty good moves on own IP storage. So maybe, you know, walk us through how that evolution has gone and how much more room there is. And it seems like it's been pretty decent growth as well for that business.
Yeah, absolutely. So we made a fairly bold strategic move in our securities analyst meeting to really focus on our own portfolio, which is our Alletra MP platform. So really going after our owned IP, and putting less emphasis and really de-emphasizing the sort of the non-IP part of our storage business. I would say that, you know, the, the owned IP, the Alletra MP platform has been very favorably received by the market. We've seen tremendous triple-digit growth in orders. It's been one of the fastest ramps, I think, in history of a product for HPE. And we've actually, you know, the third most important metric is to me is market share. We've gained share and points in a fairly competitive market.
And so that's a proof point that, you know, when you invest in your own IP and you win, you've definitely got the, you've got the right strategy. So certainly focused on Alletra MP and more to go in that space. And so we've re-engineered the business. We've moved, also. I would just add, we've collapsed our hybrid cloud portfolio and our server portfolio into one segment. So going forward from a reporting perspective, as we go to report our Q1 results, we'll be reporting that under the cloud and AI segment. And we will call out storage revenue specifically so you get a much cleaner disclosure around storage going forward too, Tim.
Okay. Great, and then maybe on the server side, a lot of discussion about server upgrades for, you know, power reasons, and it's also been a fairly good enterprise server year for the industry, so maybe touch on how sustainable you think that business would be.
Yeah. No, absolutely. As we most recently, we went through the announcement of both our Gen 11 and Gen 12 products. They constitute today, you know, probably upwards of about 90% of the revenue on the traditional server side. Now, clearly these generations of servers just have high performance, high compute power. And if you're running a data center today, you've got enormous pressure both in terms of space and power. So I think it's been a fairly easy choice for CIOs to move into newer generation and new performance because, you know, I think one Gen 11, one Gen 12 replaces a multitude of older servers like Gen 8s and such.
So if you're just doing sort of server economics and you're a CIO, it is certainly, you know, you have upgrading becomes a much easier decision when you've got all these pressure points in terms of just the space available and then also power. Now, clearly the commodity cost environment is gonna put some pressure there. There's no doubt as you're gonna face some rising server costs. But the expectations are that the performance will continue to just outweigh some of those server economics. So we continue to be optimistic about, you know, server continued performance of traditional server. We've had a good year, I'd say, in 2025 after we got through what was perhaps a correction in Q1. The remainder of the year, I'd say, went really well in terms of traditional server economics. We're expecting that to continue.
I'd say the only sort of headwind there is gonna be, certainly commodity costs as we go through 2026.
Okay. Great. Wanted to go back to networking with our last time here. One of the things that was interesting, the Juniper deal took a while to close and there's overlap in campus and branch and Wi-Fi. But both businesses did pretty well, which is kind of rare because your competitors are gonna go in and say you can't go with them. You don't know what's gonna happen. So walk us through from your standpoint, you know, how is that business different now that it's all done and you're starting the integration? Does that position the combined asset to be even stronger than the two pieces before, or any color on that would be helpful?
Yeah. No, absolutely. I think you're spot on. I mean, a lot of times in deals like this, things can go awry in your sort of core part of your product portfolio. What I'd say, particularly in campus and branch, we're clearly a, you know, very strong number two today, which is, you know, excellent. And I think Rami is. I give a big shout out to the product teams. I think they've done a tremendous job of trying to navigate the two platforms, you know, both Mist and Aruba Central. And last week in Barcelona, I think Rami articulated quite clearly what the plans are. And I think this, his strategy is really to cross-pollinate the best of both platforms into each other so that customers see that stickiness in terms of the commitment that they've made to the respective platforms.
I know on the Mist side, I'll give you an example here. You know, we've sort of taken the backend of the LLM that we had on Mist and now applying that to Aruba Central. So Rami's team had years of experience. They built up on just networking, both in terms of understanding like Zoom performance, video performance. We've taken all that leverage to all of that learning now. We've sort of applied that to Aruba Central as well. So that's great. So that means that those customers now can avail themselves of all the years of learning, et cetera, that came out of Mist into Aruba Central.
So I think that strategy that Rami's taken around cross-pollination onto both platforms has hopefully given customers a sense of security that there is commitment there and, you know, they can understand that they're gonna, you know, the platforms themselves are gonna scale up in terms of just the capabilities over time. So I think that has really helped us. Plus, I'd say there's just an opportunity on areas like WLAN in terms of campus and branch. And honestly, at the end of the day, you know, one of the things that Juniper probably lacked that today that we're gonna have is an expanded go-to-market portfolio. Juniper operated, I think, in about 30 countries, more than double that just joining the HPE family today. You know, we've got the opportunity to open up that entire platform to more than two X of those countries around the world.
So our partners' community is super excited 'cause now they can sell a much more expanded portfolio than they could before. And we can take the Mist platform and vice versa and plant that into our very strong enterprise backbone that we've had for many years. So I think that it was a very good deal on a lot of fronts, but perhaps folks underestimated a lot of those strengths out there, Tim, that we had because, you know, we Juniper just didn't have that scale and reach from a go-to-market perspective.
Right. Right. Okay. Good. Maybe we'll end with, you know, financial one or two for you. You talked about some of this at SAM, but when you think high level about, you know, margin opportunities for the company, obviously you have some of the restructuring that's happening or the cost savings from Juniper. What do you think are the big drivers when thinking about growth and operating margin in the next few years?
Yeah. No, look, I think headwinds and tailwinds. Obviously, the headwind we talked about here is just commodities on gross margins, but what I would say that from a tailwind side, you know, we announced at Securities Analyst Meeting a combined synergy plan for both Juniper and Catalyst of $1 billion plus. And, you know, really pleased with the performance that we've seen there. That's certainly a tailwind for us as we continue to execute that through 2026, 2027. We expect a lot of the hard work on restructuring will be done by the end of 2027. So you'll start to see that flow through margins in the back half of 2026 and then obviously well into 2027. So that should provide, I think, a nice tailwind there into the business.
And what I would say is, look, you know, we've seen pretty good performance already just out the gate on margins alone in Q4, particularly on the networking side and actually even on our cloud and AI business. And we expect that to continue into Q1, particularly on networking as well and cloud and AI. And, you know, candidly speaking, I would say that we were pleased with cash flow. We didn't talk much about cash flow, but we had really good solid performance on cash flow in Q4. We actually were able to improve working capital on core Juniper just by taking our own credit collections process and even applying that to Juniper. We got a nice uplift on cash flow.
So early days yet, Tim, but, you know, I'm sort of optimistic about just the progress we'll make on the actual integration of the deal itself and the flow through economics that we'll see on margins and cash flow.
Okay. Great. You took my follow-up on cash flow [crosstalk] I didn't even have to ask.
Oh, good. I was there. There you go.
So, all right. I think we're coming up on time here. So really appreciate the time. Thank you for coming.
Thank you.
Thanks, everybody, for joining.
Thank you very much. Great to be here.