HP's Future is about Cloud and 3D Printers

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HP reported its fourth quarter fiscal 2014 earnings on November 25, showing mixed trends across its business units and the company heads for a split in the coming year.

For the fourth quarter, HP reported revenue of $28.4 billion for a two percent year-over-year decline. For the full fiscal 2014 year, revenue came in at $111.5 billion for a one percent year-over-year decline. Looking into HP’s business units, the Personal Systems group reported a four percent year-over-year revenue gain, while printing revenue was down by five percent. Enterprise Group revenue was also down by four percent while software revenue was down by one percent year-over-year.

Though there was revenue decline, Meg Whitman Chairman, President and CEO at HP, sees the overall results as being positive in terms of operational improvements and profitability.

“In fact, we saw year-over-year operating margin expansion in every one of our businesses in the fourth quarter for the first time in many years,” Whitman said during her company’s earnings call with financial analysts.

Whitman is also particularly optimistic about a few key areas of the HP business. One of those areas is the cloud, where HP announced its Helion portfolio of products and services earlier this year.

“In the fourth quarter, we continued our momentum in HP Helion, with the acquisition of Eucalyptus, a provider of open source software for building private and hybrid enterprise clouds,” Whitman said.

Whitman is also optimistic about the potential opportunity of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) which is an area that HP is very active in.

“NFV represents one of the most significant shifts in the telecom industry in twenty years and HP is very well-positioned to capitalize on this shift,” Whitman said. “With open and agile architectures, such as our Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Helion cloud technologies, we are leading the move away from monolithic purpose-built products.”

One the consumer side, Whitman briefly discussed HP’s vision for 3D printing. Part of that vision includes the HP Multi Jet Fusion, 3D printing platform technology.

“HP Multi Jet Fusion leverages our 30 years of expertise and intellectual property in inkjet printing to develop a 3-D printing solution that is 10 times faster than even the best technologies in the market today with better quality and lower cost,” Whitman commented.

HP Split

On October 6, HP announced its intention to split and become two separate companies. HP Enterprise will focus on enterprise services and technologies while HP Inc will handle the consumer business and printing.

Whitman noted that over the last month, she has met with many customers, partners and employees and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“They are excited about the potential of these two laser-focused companies that will each be leaders in their respective markets and what that can mean for their businesses and their careers,” Whitman said. “It’s still early in the process but we have a comprehensive plan to ensure that we execute a successful separation with minimal disruption to the business.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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