Meg Whitman: HPE software's new owner? Kill a product? Never!

... we can easily kill off products ourselves

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s chief recently told customers that Micro Focus, the soon-to-be new owner of its Software division, has never closed a product from a firm it acquired. What HPE didn’t tell those clients is that it itself was going to kill off a certain line - Service Anywhere.

The US giant has confirmed in a statement to The Reg that it is doing a bit of housekeeping before sending the business into the welcoming arms of Micro Focus in March.

“To better focus investment, innovation and go forward strategy in our IT Service Management Automation portfolio, HPE will discontinue new sales for our Service Anywhere SaaS offering,” a spokesman told us.

“We will maintain service and support for existing customers to ensure continuity of operations, and refocus our development resources to enable customers to achieve greater efficiency, agility and faster time to value.”

We understand the people working on the product will be shifted to container tech, micro-services and analytics stuff. The death of Services Everywhere contrasts the warmer sentiments HPE CEO Meg Whitman cooked up at the Discover event at the end of last month.

She told an audience of CIO and senior tech buyers that their investments in HPE Software were safe in the hands of Micro Focus.

Whitman claimed HPE would not have sold its Software business had it not been assured of the buyer’s noble intentions.

“In fact, Micro Focus, on the one hand, has never shut down a product that they have acquired or merged with and they also have many growing assets and businesses that we think will be important to all of you going forward.”

She added: “For those of you that have made investments in our software business, please rest assured that we remain fully committed to you, and I want you to make sure you feel very comfortable with what we are doing with these assets."

Of course, this isn’t the first time Whitman has said and done different things; think of her telling people the "One HP" strategy was sound, before she split the PC and print business from the rest of the company; think of the "no conflict" message between resellers and the enterprise services business.

The irony isn’t lost on customers either. One told us he’d heard the comments at Discover and was now scratching his head.

“Micro Focus has apparently never shut down a product, according to Meg Whitman… Looks like HPE is getting that out of the way before the spin merge. First for the chip is pure SaaS management products, sales halted…. more Software products expected to be culled soon,” he claimed. ®