By most accounts, splitting off from the PC and printer side of the former Hewlett-Packard Co. business has been a good move for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE). In March, the company topped analyst expectations for the first quarter results and issued strong guidance for the remainder of the fiscal year. Now investors and customers will be watching closely to see if HPE can maintain the momentum.

The company has certainly been busy. Among its recent announcements, HPE:

• Redoubled its focus on private cloud, including committing to big investments in OpenStack;
• Reached out to the small and midsize business (SMB) market with a subscription-based cloud-in-a-box;
• Launched a managed analytics platform that attempts to challenge IBM’s Watson Developer Cloud;
• Made a bid for leadership in managing the Internet of things;
• Debuted what it claimed is the industry’s best-performing converged storage array;
• Introduced a new kind of non-volatile memory in its new ProLiant Gen9 servers;
• Published a comprehensive report on cyber risk;
• Courted big banks with a new analytics service focused on avoiding compliance breaches.

And that’s just a sampling. The good news for customers and investors is that HPE appears to be active across multiple industry and technology fronts right now. After struggling with whether to try to become a major public infrastructure-as-a-service provider, HPE decided to forego that market in favor of a focus on private cloud, with a big bet on OpenStack.

It looks like that was good timing. “Wikibon believes that the OpenStack community and technology has stabilized to the point where private cloud deployments are realistic for many customers,” wrote Wikibon analyst Brian Gracely in a recent report on Wikibon Premium.

HPE has hedged its bets with OpenStack, however. In March it led a funding round for startup Mesosphere Inc., whose Datacenter Operating System (DCOS) helps enterprises build microservices-based applications, run big data systems and operate large production container environments. The move is indicative of a broader HP pitch for “modernization,” or continual evolution of data center infrastructure to take advantage of new technologies like hyper-scale computing and dense storage. For HPE, of course, the payoff is that customers continually upgrade their equipment.

These concepts play well to HP’s advanced research, which has always been a strong point of the company. In March the company launched a hyperscale storage server that can pack as much as 640 terabytes of capacity in a standard 4U chassis. Its Moonshot hardware is aimed at highly scalable applications, and, off in the future, there’s The Machine, a concept box that HPE claims “Will reinvent the fundamental architecture of computers.” When such a machine will ship is anybody’s guess, though.

By the numbers

The analyst consensus is that the company will report earnings of 42 cents for the current quarter. Last quarter HPE earned 41 cents, which slightly beat estimates. Mean estimate for sales for the current quarter is $12.35 billion. Another upside surprise would indicate that the previous quarter wasn’t just a blip, and should help reassure customers that HPE has recovered from some damaging management and investment blunders.

“We have, in a way, reinvented the company, which is something you don’t do very often,” said Scott Weller, senior vice president and general manager of technology services support for HPE in a December interview with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team. “But I think the companies that can reinvent at the right times are the ones that survive and thrive.” HPE hopes its timing is right.

Photo by Sheila Sund via Flicr CC