HP Enterprise branding unveiled: Why is it a green rectangle?

Las Vegas, NV – Hewlett Packard Enterprise is here.

At what HP called the last Discover conference before the company’s official split November 1, company president and CEO Meg Whitman talked branding and new priorities for the enterprise-focused company-to-be.

The new logo for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, unveiled in April, was elaborated upon by Whitman during her keynote Tuesday afternoon.

“We wanted to create an identity that also represents our simpler structure and more focused portfolio,” she said. “There’s two things we really wanted to get across.  First, the simplicity of our logo is symbolic.  Making it simple for our customers and partners to do business with us.  Being precise in our engineering and innovation.  Second is the colour and shape.  There’s not a lot of green in our industry. The colour green signals growth and opportunity, and … sustainability.  The rectangle symbolizes the window of opportunity from what we can build together.”

Whitman further appealed to her customer and partner base, which she compared to the taxi industry in face of disruptors like Uber.

“The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency says cab usage has dropped 65 per cent in two years,” said Whitman. She said that rather than focusing on Uber as a disruptor, it’s more about “the inability of the cab industry to act quickly to transform its own business model to compete.  Did they have the time to respond?  Absolutely.  Uber was started in 2009.  But they needed an IT infrastructure that would allow them to pivot when the inevitable disruption arrived.  And they didn’t have that.”

She emphasized that with four new areas of focus, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will be the company to bring companies into new infrastructures.

The four transformation areas HP presented include:

1. Transforming to a hybrid infrastructure to get better value out of existing investments
2. Protect your digital enterprise by reducing security threats and implementing sound backup and recovery solutions
3. Empower the data-driven organization using open-source and low-cost solutions to generate real-time actionable insights
4. Enable workplace productivity to help develop digital experiences

“We’re confident that the separation will give both HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise a new level of focus and efficiency,” Whitman said.