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Hewlett Packard Enterprise CTO, CCO to call it a day

Machine moves closer, execs move(d) out

Martin Fink, the chief techie straddling Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s global Labs is quitting just as the prototype of his most ambitions project to date, The Machine, edges closer.

In a blog note today, CEO Meg Whitman confirmed the CTO will be “retiring” at the end of the year after more than three decades at the company.

“Martin has had a remarkable career, driving some of our most important initiatives, including our cloud, open source and Linux strategies and leading the Business Critical Systems division and The Machine,” she said.

HPE isn’t exactly synonymous with the cloud - it dumped its public cloud offering at the start of this year, but The Machine is as expansive as any project a tech vendor has embarked upon.

The family of products includes the delayed memristor memory substrate, silicon photonics, a brand new operating system and customised chips.

Elements of the promised innovations have made their way into products including Synergy, but the full0-fat hyped ‘new way to compute’ has always been just around the corner.

Whitman said today the “prototype” will “bring The Machine to life”, but provided little detail. El Reg awaits developments with some interest.

So who is the new Fink? Not another chief techie per se. HPE Labs will move into the Enterprise Group under the control of Antonio Neri.

“To further accelerate the time it takes to drive technology from research and development to commercialisation, we will move Hewlett Packard Labs into the Enterprise Group”, said Meg.

This, she said, will help “align” R&D legwork on The Machine with the business - particularly how we integrate key components like photonics and memristor into existing product lines - by bringing together our innovation roadmap with our business roadmap”.

Bringing supposedly bleeding edge stuff to market is one thing, then the sales team have to get their heads around it and convince customers of its worth.

Whitman also today revealed a wider restructure at HPE to “centralise and simplify” the organ. The Enterprise Group will move to internal sales reps and third party channel sellers to a single global unit run by Peter Ryan, currently svp and MD for EMEA.

Product marketing, e-commerce and customer advocacy groups are also to be merged, the IT and cyber security teams are also to come under the control of Chris Hsu.

All these changes also coincide with the end of chief customer's officer John Hinshaw's career at HPE - he was previously in charge of customer advocacy, IT and operations and oversaw the split of HP into two companies, and did a good job, channel partners told us at the time.

Hinshaw is due to leave the building at the end of the year.

“We’re living in a world where continuous improvement is essential to long-term success,” said Whitman of the changes. ®

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