Antonio Neri, CEO and president of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, was in India in March this year and was interviewed by Forbes.
Below, you can read unedited parts of the interview that focus on India.
What brings you to India?
Neri: I did the official inauguration of the building, and over the next few months, we’re going to move people from five different sites around Bangalore into the new site which will host almost 11,000 people. HPE India has the highest number of employees outside of the United States. It is more than 20 percent of the total company headcount. Fundamentally, it is one of the largest geographies for us from the headcount and business perspective.
Are you finding enough customers in India?
Neri: Oh yes. The business has grown more than 200 percent in the last year alone. India is approaching probably 5 percent of the total revenue.
How do you see the situation for the IT sector?’
Neri: India is well positioned to grow as a country and to deliver solutions for the globe. India is the fastest-growing economy today on the planet. Globally, IT will continue to be resilient and as always, there will be ups and downs but in the long term, it is always looking up.
What are your plans here?
Neri: We want to double that business in the next three years. India is very strategic, and we do a lot of our innovation here. There is incredible talent here that is driving innovation. A big chunk of what we do from a global services perspective is happening here in Bangalore. A big chunk of what we do in the compute software for managing the fleet of compute platforms is done here in India as well. We have our back office here.
On ‘what are the areas you are focusing on?
Neri: It’s all about the services aspect, and then obviously manufacturing. HPE builds and ships four servers per minute, 46 terabytes of storage per minute. So, we’re looking at (manufacturing in India). We are working with the government to make sure the policy is right. It’s not just the percentage, but the flexibility and I know there’s going to be a new policy which is called the PLI 2.0, because the original PLI was more designed for the consumer type of products.
