New leadership is coming to Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. on February 1 when current Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman steps down and Antonio Neri (HPE’s current president) takes over. At first glance, it would appear that the company is trading a business and sales executive in Whitman for one with a strong engineering background, but as one analyst has pointed out, Neri brings something else to the table for HPE: customers.

“Antonio’s got a great reputation. This is a guy who’s going to turn on a lot of customers,” said Peter Burris (@plburris, pictured, left), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

During this week’s HPE Discover EU 2017 event in Madrid, Spain, Burris and co-host Dave Vellante (@dvellante, pictured, right) discussed HPE’s incoming top executive, the impact of two key acquisitions, and the company’s position in enterprise information technology versus Amazon.

Bringing cloud to the data

HPE’s next CEO joined the company in 1995 as a customer services engineer and led Hewlett Packard’s servers and networking business before being named HPE president after the company split into two entities. Neri is widely believed to be one of the key figures in the company’s push to bring cloud compute technologies to data.

“It’s apparently, in large part, Antonio’s brainchild,” Burris said. “He conceived it; he invested in it; he nurtured it.”

Neri will be aided by a couple of fortuitous acquisitions by HPE. In 2015, the company bought Aruba Networks Inc., which gave it wireless mobility solutions technology that is now proving to be enormously beneficial as the need for edge computing grows with “internet of things” devices.

In a side discussion during a visit to theCUBE, Whitman expressed gratitude for adding Aruba to the portfolio. “She told us, ‘We got kind of lucky with Aruba,’” Vellante said. “Not only is it a great business, but you’ve got something that’s increasingly strategic for organizations.”

Earlier this year, HPE snapped up Nimble Storage, an all-flash and hybrid storage array business. The acquisition included an analytics package called InfoSight, which already had a popular following.

InfoSight is now running on HPE’s 3Par StoreServ, and one company executive told theCUBE that he was hopeful it would be running across the entire networking, server and storage line by the end of next year. “That would be a major accomplishment,” Vellante said.

At the start of the gathering in Spain this week, a central question was how HPE would present itself as a viable alternative to the new model of computing being established by Amazon. “We didn’t know who was going to lead that other side,” Burris said. “It’s nice to see this conference indicate that HPE is in a position to help show the industry how cloud truly can go from centralized down to the edge.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU 2017 Madrid event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE