Jim Jackson, Chief Marketing Officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise 

What are the big success stories for your brand over the last 12 months that have driven your brand strength and growth? 

Since our separation from HP back in 2015, we have been on a mission to establish and grow the HPE brand in line with our evolution as a company. This past year in particular was pivotal, as we accelerated our transformation to a truly “as-a-service” model and positioned ourselves as a cloud services company. As a result, our innovative HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform became our focus and the brand we wanted to land.

With HPE GreenLake platform, customers gain both freedom and control with a cloud experience wherever they need it. It’s no longer just a question of “do we or don’t we go to the cloud,” it’s about truly leveraging data wherever it lives — whether that’s at the edge, where so much computing is now happening through millions of sensors and IoT devices; across their cloud providers and their on-premises locations. We bring the cloud experience to where customers demand it, and that’s the core of the HPE GreenLake platform brand message – the cloud that comes to you. The HPE GreenLake brand is all about the customer experience; and that experience and our brand are now one in the same. That’s how we think about it. With our HPE GreenLake platform, we are pioneering a new type of marketplace or category – that is, edge to cloud.

Thinking about the customer: we have a hypothesis that consumers once made purchases to signify their economic capital, then later to signify their intellectual capital, and most recently to signal their “ethical capital.” Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint? What about your brand do you fix & what do you flex?

The idea of ethical capital absolutely resonates with us, and here’s why: One of the most important assets for most companies, regardless of the industry, is their data. Data is growing at an exponential rate, fueled largely by compute moving to the edge, and enterprises are both excited and wary of how they can best take advantage of valuable data assets. Sure, they know full well the power of data and the potential it carries to reinvent and drive their business. But they are wary of how the data is used. Is it secure? Will a third-party system maintain data privacy? How can they ensure that data is used only in ways they deem acceptable, or even ethical? These are all big questions, and we’re working hard to ensure our customers can trust us with their data, as we work on their behalf across edge to cloud.

We often talk about how data will become a currency – an asset that lives on a company’s balance sheet. For that to happen, data must be treated with intense care and environmental consideration. Our goal is to demonstrate that we are the edge-to-cloud company, complete with best-in-class software services, that you can trust. And we’re well aware that trust isn’t something you can buy, it’s earned.

We often talk about how data will become a currency – an asset that lives on a company’s balance sheet. For that to happen, data must be treated with intense care and environmental consideration. Our goal is to demonstrate that we are the edge-to-cloud company, complete with best-in-class software services, that you can trust

Increasingly we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brand’s commercial landscape. And that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint?

The market is constantly shifting, and we are shifting to lead the market. This all boils down to understanding and addressing a customer’s needs and problems, which is something we obsess over. You can’t let traditional definitions define your business. You must understand not just what challenges customers have today, but what they will have tomorrow.

This is also why traditional categories often can become dated. The market is changing too fast for the naming conventions to keep up. We’ve been working with analysts and others to help them understand the category we pioneered – edge-to-cloud.

If you follow the customer, it often leads you to undefined places. And that leads to new solutions and new categories. That’s what’s happening today. We’re hearing from customers who can’t easily move everything to public cloud, and that are tied to a data center or edge. They are looking for a new solution, a cloud that comes to where the majority of their apps and data are today. But there is not a defined category for this segment. So, when you innovate to solve these kinds of new problems, you are creating new markets and categories because we continue to evolve to bring a new kind of experience to them.

We are a long way from when we used to view our competitors based on scale. That just no longer works, and we have to entirely reset our thinking. We are always looking at smaller players, the disruptive players, who have built powerful services often based on a cloud model. Disruptors can emerge seemingly out of nowhere, so it’s critical that we don’t have a myopic view of the landscape.

Customer expectations are driving a huge shift in our engagement model. We’re shifting from a classic transactional selling motion to an outcome-based consultative approach. Customer business models are changing at incredible speed, we need to understand those challenges so we can deliver the right solutions with a simple experience. Additionally, we’re building out the enablement curriculum to support our sellers and bringing together the solution stacks to get that outcome-based dialogue kickstarted.

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is settling back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy?

There will never be a post-social justice time or a moment where a light switch flips and generations-old issues are finally resolved. We need to stay focused and remain active.

We’ve always been a purpose-driven company, and it is crucial to how we define our brand. We believe that through our people and our technology, we can improve the way that people live and work. But the last year or so has pushed us to look at ourselves more closely, and to be honest about where we can do better. We’ve organized listening sessions to hear directly from team members and collect feedback on how we as a company can take action to drive change, and we’ve been vocal on issues where we believe our corporate voice needs to be heard.

And we know that our team members expect this of us. They want to be heard, and they want us as a company to speak up on issues that are important to them and align to our corporate values. Authenticity is critical, and who we are as a brand to our external stakeholders must be consistent with the experience of our team members each day.

We’re not waiting for a major disruptor; I would argue we are the disruptor. We’re constantly engaging with customers and becoming what they need us to become to meet their future needs

What are the major disrupters and accelerators of competition and brand growth on your horizon?

We have defined an entirely new market based on customer demand (edge to cloud), and we’re now leading the industry there. We’re not waiting for a major disruptor; I would argue we are the disruptor. We’re constantly engaging with customers and becoming what they need us to become to meet their future needs. That’s what is accelerating our brand growth. The reality is the cloud model of today – as powerful as it is – wasn’t built to handle everything. Companies need new approaches and experiences due to the explosion of data and concerns about data sovereignty and privacy, and they need new innovations to meet the hypergrowth of edge computing. That’s where HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform comes in, bringing the technology to where the customer needs and wants it. We know this is the right path to take. We are focused on developing new experiences, engaging new personas, and reaching new buying cohorts. We are all in on this major shift.