慧与季报透露了哪些重要信息

慧与的第三季度财报令华尔街普大喜奔，由于成绩好于预期，慧与的股价在盘后交易中上涨了5个百分点。

摩尔战略见解公司创始人、分析师帕特里克·摩尔海德指出，慧与在网络、存储和金融服务方面实现了两位数的增长率，在他看来，这里都是“非常积极的迹象”。另一方面，他也对服务器业务收益超过1%的下滑表示了担忧。

下面我们回顾一下上上周二晚的慧与收益电话会议，看看能在其中找到哪些线索。

1、惠特曼不走了

Uber上星期任命了达拉·科斯罗萨西作为公司新任CEO。或许关于梅格·惠特曼将跳槽至Uber的传闻也可以就此尘埃落定了。在此次收益电话会议上，针对各种相关传言，惠特曼也重申了自己对慧与的忠诚。

“我是在Uber物色新任CEO的最后阶段才接到电话的。我想说，Uber的业务模式很有意思，在某种程度上跟eBay很像，因为它有一个司机社区，就像eBay有一个卖家社区一样。”惠特曼本人既是Uber的投资者，之前也曾担任过eBay的CEO。

不过之前惠特曼曾公开表示，自己对跳槽过程Uber没有兴趣。在此次收益电话会议上，惠特曼再度表示会将精力集中在慧与上。“我已经将人生中的六年奉献给了这家公司，况且这里还有更多工作要做。我哪儿也不会去。”

2、Aruba成收益增长龙头

2015年，就在惠普拆分成两家公司之前，惠普以30亿美元收购了网络设备制造商Aruba。拆分之后的慧与继承了Aruba的业务，而Aruba也继续成为慧与全线业务中的亮点。本季度，慧与的网络业务营收入总体上涨16%，而其中Aruba的营收入较上年同期增长了32%，使其成为慧与网络业务中最耀眼的明星。

Aruba的网络设备据说可以提供安全的无线网络连接。随着世界进入物联网时代，这一点也变得越发重要，因为全球各地数以亿计的设备都需要安全的无线网络连接来进行互联，或是联入一个中心化的数据聚合点。而据摩尔海德称，Aruba在这方面做得相当不错。

3、慧与仍未明确低端服务器战略

今年第一、第二季度，惠特曼曾表示，公司将评估是否将留在低端服务器市场，这些低端服务器的买主主要是大型的云计算公司，那些公司一般大量采购廉价服务器，但价格极低，留给慧与的利润也极为单薄。

在此次会议上，惠特曼也强调了向微软等“一线”品牌销售Cloudline云服务器的难度。

“这项业务是很有难度的，而且没有多少利润。所以我们需要为Cloudline服务器的长期发展找到答案。”她指出。

惠特曼仍未最终决定是否留在低端商业服务器业务中，不过她承诺，公司将在10月前的分析师会议前做出决定。

4、存储也是亮点业务

慧与的总体全闪存业务较上年同期增长了32%。这在相当程度上要归功于慧与今年三月收购的Nimble Storage公司。闪存又叫固态存储技术，它比传统磁盘存储器速度更快，但价格也更高。据惠特曼估计，目前只有10%的企业数据中心迁移到了全闪存上，所以这个领域还有销量增长的空间。不过同时慧与也面临着戴尔科技的EMC部门、NetApp公司以及Pure Storage等年轻闪存企业的竞争。

另一方面，慧与的3Par中端存储系统的销量较上年同期下降了9%。这也表明各个细分市场对存储设备的需求差异。

5、慧与将帮助企业选择正确的IT发展途径

惠特曼曾反复表示，慧与的宗旨是帮助企业用户部署最合理的IT技术，不管是在企业的内部服务器上部署，还是在微软Azure（Azure也是慧与最青睐的公有云合作伙伴）这种公有云服务上部署，或者是这两种选择的某种组合模式。正是在这一战略的指导下，慧与于本周二收购了Cloud Technology Partners公司。不过关于此次收购的细节尚未被批露。

CTP可以帮助企业明确他们的应用和数据应该存放在哪里。惠特曼表示：“我们的战略的一个核心部分是要让IT变得更简单，而CTP能在这方面起到帮助。”（财富中文网）

译者：贾政景

Wall Street liked what it saw in Hewlett-Packard Enterprise's third-quarter earnings, sending HPE shares up more than 5% in after-hours trading based on better-than-expected results.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Strategies & Insights, commended HPE on achieving double-digit growth in networking, storage, and financial services. Those are all "very positive signs" in his view. On the flip side he expressed concern over a 1% decline in server revenue.

Here are a few key threads from the HP Enterprise's earnings call on Tuesday night.

1: Whitman is staying put

Uber named Dara Khosrowshahi as its new CEO last week, so you might think questions about whether HPE chief executive Meg Whitman wanted that job would fade away. But you would be wrong. On the call, Whitman was asked about her commitment to HP Enterprise amid reports that she had been a candidate for the Uber position.

"I was called in very late in the Uber search, and I said it was an interesting business model—very similar to eBay in some ways in that it has a community of drivers while eBay has a community of sellers," said Whitman, an investor in Uber who was also previously eBay's CEO.

But Whitman, who previously denied interest in the Uber post, again stated that she remains focused on HPE. "I've dedicated the last six years of my life to this company and there is more work to do here," she said. "I am actually not going anywhere."

2: Aruba is the gift that keeps on giving

In 2015, just before splitting into two companies, HP acquired networking gear maker Aruba for $3 billion. One of its spawn, HPE(hpe), ended up owning Aruba, which continues to be a bright spot. For the quarter, Aruba revenue rose 32% year-over year making it the star of HPE's overall networking lineup that saw overall revenue rise 16%.

Aruba's gear claims to offer secure wireless connections, a key consideration in the Internet of Things era where millions of devices scattered worldwide require secure wireless connections to each other or to a more central data aggregation point. Aruba does great in this realm, Moorhead said.

3: HPE is still figuring out what to do in low-end servers

For the first and second quarters this year, Whitman said the company will evaluate whether it should be in the business of selling inexpensive servers to large cloud computing companies. Those companies tend to buy cheap servers by the boatload, but at a very low price which means extremely thin profit to HPE.

Selling Cloudline servers to major "tier one" customers like Microsoft is a tough business, Whitman reiterated on the call, referring to HPE's brand of servers in this category.

"There is a headwind there. This is a lumpy business without much profit, so we need to figure out the long-term answer on Cloudline," she noted.

Whitman still hasn't made a decision about whether to stay in the commodity server business, but she promised that the answer would come before the company's analyst meeting, which is usually in October.

4: Storage was (mostly) a bright spot

Overall HPE sales of all-flash storage rose 32% year over year, led by Nimble Storage, a company HPE acquired in March.. Flash, or solid-state storage, is faster but more expensive than traditional disk storage. Whitman estimated that only 10% of corporate data centers have moved to all-flash, so there's room to increase sales in that category. But there's also plenty of competition from traditional rivals like Dell Technologies' EMC unit and NetApp (ntap) as well as younger flash pioneers like Pure Storage (pstg).

On a more sobering note, sales of 3Par mid-range storage systems fell 9% year-over-year in the quarter, showing that demand for storage varies by category.

5: HPE will help businesses pick the right IT path

Whitman has said repeatedly that HPE is all about helping business customers deploy their IT where it makes most sense, whether that is in their internal server rooms, in a public cloud like Microsoft Azure (HPE's preferred public cloud partner, Whitman stressed), or in some combination of the two. That strategy drove HPE's acquisition of Cloud Technology Partners, announced earlier Tuesday. Terms of that deal were not disclosed.

CTP helps customers figure out where their applications and data should reside. "A core part of our strategy is to make IT simple, and CTP helps with that," Whitman said.