UPDATED 12:55 EDT / FEBRUARY 21 2014

HP Earnings Shows CEO Whitman Turning Things Around

meg_whitmanHewlett-Packard announced earnings that is looking like the turnaround is happening. CEO Meg Whitman is pushing her plan forward.

On Thursday, the company turned in increase in the quarterly earnings which shows investors that the company’s ship is turning in the right direction or at least back on track to solid fundamentals.

This marks the return to their roots of enterprise and computing focus. The baggage of a bipolar strategy of “do we sell PCs and mobile division” to “keeping the asset” comes to rest. HP is going all in on the future of computing or as they say a new style of IT.  Over the past two years HP has rebooted their focus on their mature but lucrative markets of PCs and mobile devices while putting some muscle to the cloud computing division run by Saar Gillai and Martin Fink.

Recently, Bethany Mayer took the helm for software defined networking for the cloud group.  Bethany Mayer, who was heading up HP Networking, will be in a new role as SVP/GM of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) (definition: Wikibon).  This new strategic role will be for the new cloud initiative formally run by Saar Gillai now by Martin Fink (all three are Cube Alumni guests).

HP is repositioning their cloud to take on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to win the enterprise business in the cloud. Other important areas for HP is software where big data will be the enabler. Here the focus will be developing their ecosystem around Vertica and Autonomy while wooing new developers to build applications ontop of HP big data and cloud platforms.

“HP is in a stronger position today than we’ve been in quite some time,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “The progress we’re making is reflected in growth across several parts of our portfolio, the growing strength of our balance sheet, and the strong support we’re receiving from customers and channel partners. Innovation is igniting our comeback, and at a time when many of our competitors are confronting new challenges, two years of turnaround work is setting us up for an exciting future.”

First quarter net revenue of $28.2 billion was down 1% from the prior-year period and flat on a constant currency basis.

Fiscal 2014 first quarter segment results

  • Personal Systems revenue was up 4% year over year with a 3.3% operating margin. Commercial revenue increased 8% and Consumer revenue declined 3%. Total units were up 6% with Desktops units down 3% and Notebooks units up 5%.
  • Printing revenue was down 2% year over year with a 16.8% operating margin. Total hardware units were up 5% with Commercial hardware units up 6% and Consumer hardware units up 4%. Supplies revenue was down 3%.
  • Enterprise Group revenue was up 1% year over year with a 14.4% operating margin. Industry Standard Servers revenue was up 6%, Storage revenue was flat, Business Critical Systems revenue was down 25%, Networking revenue was up 4% and Technology Services revenue was down 4%.
  • Enterprise Services revenue was down 7% year over year with a 1% operating margin. Application and Business Services revenue was down 4%, and Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing revenue declined 9%.
  • Software revenue was down 4% year over year with a 15.8% operating margin. Support revenue was down 2%, license revenue was down 6%, professional services revenue was down 12% and software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue was up 6%.
  • HP Financial Services revenue was down 9% year over year with a 6% decrease in net portfolio assets and an 18% increase in financing volume. The business delivered an operating margin of 11.6%.
  • Corporate Investments revenue increased due to the sale of a portfolio of mobile computing intellectual property.

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