Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

October 19, 2023

New York Stock Exchange US Information Technology Technology Hardware, Storage and Peripherals shareholder_meeting 182 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Unknown Attendee

attendee
#1

Please welcome Vice President, Investor Relations, Jeff Kvaal.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#2

Good afternoon. Welcome to the 2023 HPE Securities Analyst Meeting. Thanks for joining us in our return to New York. We haven't been here since before COVID, so 4 or 5 years now. It's nice to see so many familiar faces in the audience. I hope for you New Yorkers, this counts as in the office day, [ I trust ] -- in office. And thank you to the many folks that are tuning in virtually as well. The agenda, we have Antonio first. He'll give us a look at how we're pivoting to our higher growth, higher margin recurring revenues, also positioning ourselves for sustainable and profitable growth. Through his talk, Antonio will introduce the heads of 3 of our new segments. So we've got Philip Mottram from Intelligent Edge, Fidelma Russo in hybrid cloud and also Justin Hotard from HPC and AI. They will give us deeper dives into each of their own businesses. We'll then take a break until 4:00. Jeremy will come on after. During the break, please give the execs a little bit of space. We'll have plenty of time for Q&A at the end. Jeremy's presentation wraps up, we'll have approximately an hour or so for Q&A. Okay. So with that, I guess let me mention that once the webcast does conclude, that's when we'll be issuing our press release and putting all the presentation materials on our website, that is at hpe/investor/sam2023. Also, we'll put a replay up on the IR website. We'll keep that up there for about a year. And lastly, let me get to the disclosures. The event may include forward-looking statements involving risks, estimates and assumptions. HPE assumes no obligation to update those statements. And with that, it's now my pleasure to welcome Antonio Neri, HP's President and CEO. Antonio?

Antonio Neri

executive
#3

All right. Thank you. Well, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. It is exciting to be back in the New York Exchange. I had the honor this morning to do again the opening bell. It's always fun to be here, and welcome to those of you joining us virtually via the webcast. Together with my leadership team today, I'm excited to -- for the opportunity to demonstrate to you how much additional value our strategy can create for our shareholders in the near and long term. I'm very proud of the progress we have made in the last 5 years. The world around us has changed immensely, and so have we. Today, as I prepare to share with you the opportunity we see for HP in the next 3 years, also reflect on the last 3 years and what they have demanded of HPE and enterprises around the world. They require vision, agility and resilience from every enterprise around the globe as well as confronted -- we all were confronted with unimaginable challenges. In that time period, HP has transformed to become the edge-to-cloud company. We have anticipated what customers will need as they recover from the pandemic, which we call the new world post-pandemic. We have offered unparalleled innovation, and we have executed extremely well. Since the beginning of fiscal year 2021, HP has successfully deployed our strategic pivot to higher margin and higher growth areas of the market, which has created strong value for our shareholders. We have delivered 13.4% revenue growth since then compared to the last trailing 12 months with particular exceptional growth in recurring revenue. Since we began our strategic as a Service pivot in 2019 and started tracking annualized revenue run rate, or ARR, we have tripled it. Last quarter, ARR rose to a record of 48%, exceeding a long-term target growth rate of between 35% and 45%, which we shared last year at SAM. HP has grown our annual non-GAAP diluted net earnings per share by 43.5% between fiscal year '20 and the trailing 12 months through the most recent quarter. In fiscal year '20, it was $1.54, and it is now at $2.21. Our non-GAAP gross margin growth has also been impressive. We have added 310 basis points to our non-GAAP gross margin since fiscal year 2021 and in the most recent trailing 12-month period at 34.8%. Our non-GAAP operating margins improved by 280 basis points in the same period. We have made these profitability gains as a result of diversifying our business to grow the software and services rich parts of our portfolio while maintaining discipline in pricing, particularly in our Compute business segment. And we have introduced profitable subscription-based cloud services with HP GreenLake, which enhances the stickiness of our solutions with our customers. Greater profitability has also enabled us to significantly increase free cash flow generation in the last 3 years. From the start of fiscal year 2021 through the most recent trailing 12 months, we have more than tripled free cash flow generation, and we are on track to deliver within the range we guided during fiscal year '23 Q3 earnings. Over approximately in the last 3 years, we have strategically focused our portfolio on areas of high growth and high margin. We generated a more than 121% total shareholder return as compared to a 37% return for the S&P 500 over the same period. Importantly, this return represents a CAGR of 31% as compared to the 11% CAGR for the S&P 500. As we produce higher profit and greater cash flow, we deliver on our commitments to provide direct capital return to our investors. Through our disciplined capital allocation framework, we returned about $11 billion to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases from the start of fiscal year 2018 to our most recent quarter. Obviously, that included the spinoff proceeds. But this capital return benefit represents 122% of our free cash flow over that period. These strong consistent results will have been admirable in any period, but I'm particularly proud of them coming off such a turbulent 3 years. Frankly, I believe the market should give us more credit for the accomplishments because they're a testament to the relevance of our strategy, the differentiation of our portfolio and the strength of our execution. We delivered when it mattered the most. And as we continue to execute against this strategy in fiscal year '24 and over the next 3 years, we will continue to accelerate value for our shareholders. Today, I will discuss HPE's compelling market opportunity for sustainable profitable growth. And at the conclusion of our time together, I hope you walk away with a deeper understanding of a few things. First, our HP's bet on the Intelligent Edge is paying off with a sizable proportion of our revenue growth and segment operating profit coming from this business segment, and how we plan to sustain our momentum through TAM expansion and market share gains. Second, how our hybrid cloud business is positioned to become a sustainable center for growth through the scale of HP GreenLake with investments to make us the #1 leading hybrid cloud provider. Third, how AI has expanded overall market opportunity to drive what we expect will be profitable growth in the next fiscal year, adding to our overall compute and HPC and AI businesses. And finally, how our continued mix shift to those areas of our portfolio combined with the operational discipline will drive profitable revenue growth for our shareholders. HP's strategy is aligned to the significant market trends we see today around edge, hybrid cloud and AI, all which will create profitable market expansion opportunities that will help us fuel our growth. Customers continue to validate our strategy, turning to us to power critical business transformations. And even in this macroeconomic environment, we continue to see them prioritizing data-first digital transformation initiatives, and those initiatives increasingly include AI, which is invigorating today's IT spending. We anticipate the overall total addressable market across our portfolio will rise by nearly $100 billion from the end of fiscal year 2022 to more than $340 billion by fiscal year 2026 when we eliminate some of the crossovers because, obviously, you have some elements of the portfolio can be added in different segments. And we intend to capture this growing TAM across the megatrends of edge, hybrid cloud and AI through a mix of HP's business segments. Our approach will include innovation in key markets where we already have a very strong position as well as customer acquisition and expansion in high-margin adjacent markets. Let's start at the edge. At the edge, we are expanding our innovation in security, private 5G and data center networking. In hybrid cloud, we continue to expand in private cloud, the segment of the market. We anticipate growing at approximately 10% CAGR. We can also capture a larger portion of the hybrid cloud market with our entry into the growing AI power IT operations management segment through our recent acquisition of OpsRamp. And in AI, we are well positioned to capture the sizable growth with our full stack AI native architecture. That includes AI infrastructure growing at a 23% CAGR, an AI platform software growing at a 32% CAGR. Ultimately, we anticipate the AI market where we play growing by roughly 2.4x to almost $150 billion by 2026. Clearly, there is a great opportunity for HP in those growth segments. So let's detail each one today so you can emerge with a better appreciation for a differentiated innovation and the strength in each category and our plans to further capitalize on the opportunity ahead of us. Our Intelligent Edge business is a prime example of what HP can do to maximize future growth with the right investment at the right time. We have invested nearly $6 billion in our Aruba, HP Aruba networking business, organically and inorganically since I became CEO. It is on track to be a more than $5 billion annual business in fiscal year '23 and beyond, poised to generate sustained revenue growth and the highest profitability of any of our business segments. It is a critical part of our business, both from a strategic and financial standpoint. Our Pro portfolio delivers what we call security-first networking from Edge-to-Cloud to exascale, which is a very important component when we talk later about that. In fiscal year '24, we will build on our successes in our HP Aruba networking, the core businesses of campus and branch, with a goal of continuing to take share in the enterprise, mid-market and SMB customer segments. We are expanding our offers in growing markets like security, private 5G and data center networking, which we have entered through organic innovation and acquisitions this year. We intend to increase our already high gross margin in this business. By fiscal year 2026, we expect our total addressable market at the edge and networking to grow to about $94 billion. Customers will continue to expect a unified network and experience that is secure, automated and high-performing as well as flexible subscription and consumption-based solutions. Our value proposition is absolutely suited to address these needs. This adds up to the significant opportunity for HPE and for our shareholders. Phil Mottram will now provide more details about our leadership position and priorities in this very important segment, so we'd like to welcome Phil. Phil, please.

Philip Mottram

executive
#4

Thank you, Antonio. So my name is Phil Mottram, and I've been running the Intelligent Edge business now a little over 2 years. It's been an incredible journey for me and my team. As you look around this room today and you admire the great decoration and you're scanning the ceiling occasionally, I also want you to pay attention to the Aruba access points that have been installed in the alcoves in the corners. So NYSE make great technology choices, and we're proud to be the wireless provider here at the New York Stock Exchange. So nice one, NYSE, if that's a phrase we can use. If you've been following HPE for the last few years, you've undoubtedly heard Antonio refer to us as the Edge-to-Cloud company. The first part is all about the connectivity, and that's where our Intelligent Edge business comes into play. In the last 2 years, we've seen significant growth in this segment, and by the end of '23, we expect the annual revenue of our Intelligent Edge business to increase by nearly $2 billion from FY '21 levels through consistent growth over that time frame. The third quarter of FY '23 marked the 11th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth, and this segment represented 20% of the company's revenues. In addition to the top line revenue growth, we've also seen an increase in profits since 2021. Through intentional efforts towards operational efficiency as well as portfolio management and a focus on margin-rich products, we've increased our profitability. In Q3, we marked a record level of operating profit margin, and we accounted for 49% of the company's total segment operating profits. So we've done this by capitalizing on the high demand in the market for our products and solutions, strategically adding more product areas to expand our TAM and focusing on our delivery mechanisms. We're giving the customers the option for consumption or subscription purchasing through our Network-as-a-Service offerings and through HPE GreenLake. With Aruba Central on HPE GreenLake, we're one of the only companies giving customers the ability to manage all of their network solutions from one single platform. As we go forward, we will continue to follow the network in order to identify selling and upselling opportunities from the access points in the ceiling to the campus switch to the SD-WAN network. Selling these incremental products to our existing customers will continue to drive revenue in core business segments. We'll also be following the network even further into the data center, integrating it with security and adding private 5G and delivering it all through the same unified cloud native experience. Additionally, we are weaving sustainability into everything that we do. This is something we feel is vitally important, and we've heard loud and clear that it's a priority for our customers as well. To give you an example of this, our asset life cycle management program within HPE Financial Services reclaims and refurbishes used assets from our customers. And over the last 3 years, we've given more than 8.2 million devices a second life, ultimately reducing the amount of material that's directed towards landfill. Bringing all of this together, we're confident that we have the right strategy in place to drive sustainable, profitable growth and deliver value for our shareholders. As we look ahead, we believe that the trends in the marketplace around hybrid work, security and data center requirements will create new opportunities for us. And while there are some headwinds related to the overall networking market growth projections, we expect to continue to sustain our Intelligent Edge business segment performance through TAM expansion and continued market share gain in key segments. We continue to innovate and enhance our offering and received validation from leading industry analysts in this regard. In the edge networking space, we're targeting a TAM of about $94 billion by 2026, and that's 1.5x the TAM that we pursued in 2022. And within that, I see 4 distinct areas of growth for our business. The first area is security. We believe that the networking market is converging with the security market under a framework called SASE, or secure access service edge. And we're not alone in that belief. Gartner believes that 60% of enterprise customers will buy SASE from a single vendor within 3 years. SASE has 5 key elements, and we already had 2 of them, with networking and firewalls. The acquisition of Axis Security earlier this year allowed us to add the missing 3 elements of SASE, namely ZTNA, SWG and CASB. Within HP Networking -- HP Aruba Networking, sorry, we've always been great at protecting things on the network. Adding Axis Security now gives us the ability to be able to protect people. So we can protect people and things across multiple network devices, all from one location on HPE GreenLake. We have a compelling and highly differentiated offer, and we're poised to gain share in this high-growth market that will represent a $3 billion TAM in 2026. The second area of growth for our business is in private 5G. So the rollout of 5G has advanced mobile networks around the world. And in many countries, governments have now assigned 5G spectrum to be used by enterprises privately, which is what is referred to as private 5G. We believe that private 5G and Wi-Fi will exist side by side, and enabling new customer use cases where outdoor coverage and latency is important such as imports, defense applications and other scenarios like mining operations and sporting events. Indeed, we recently provided private 5G and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity for the Ryder Cup in Italy. So we provided always-on connectivity to 250,000 spectators whilst also delivering a secure private network for the operations staff across the hundreds of acres that made up the venue. So hats off to us for that. So private 5G represents a significant opportunity to enable a unified customer experience with security and policy management. Additionally, this represents a significant opportunity to HPE to capture market share in this space at healthy gross margins. The third area of growth for our business is in data center networking, which is an area that will grow to a $19 billion TAM by 2026. Today, our HPE Aruba Networking CX Switch platform is already sold into many data centers around the world. We've spent 12 months enhancing the capability of our switching products and have a 2-year road map that is highly differentiated through our HP Aruba Networking CX operating system, which will enable enterprise customers to deploy cloud-native networking in their data centers or colo facilities. We expect to continue to capture market share from existing customers, especially those who want to extend the management ease of Aruba Central into their data center. The fourth area of growth for our business is in NaaS or Network-as-a-Service. The NaaS market is expected to reach -- to represent a $3 billion opportunity by 2026, which is good news. But the better news is that we already have a clear lead in this market. With our customers, we can take them on a journey to NaaS as opposed to some of the more recent startups in this space, which require customers to rip and replace all of their network technology in order to deploy NaaS. Our intelligence services capability or the managed services piece of NaaS offers a 98% reduction of network events through automation and utilization of AI, ML driven analytics. NaaS also represents an important way in which we're delivering on our commitment to sustainability, because NaaS creates a circular economy by extending the life of assets for customers. For these reasons and more, we continue to see demand from customers for NaaS solutions. Today, we have a growing number of customers across different verticals, including retail, hospitality, higher education and manufacturing. And some of the customers already consuming our NaaS services are The Home Depot, CarMax and KPMG. And now, in addition to large and global customers, we're now scaling into the commercial and mid-market segments through and with our channel partners. So those are the 4 areas where we expect to see significant growth in our business. Aggressively pursuing these growth opportunities while continuing to capture revenue in our core segments is how we will drive sustained business momentum. And our ability to do that can all be put down to one key point: customers buy HPE Aruba Networking because we are customer-centric. Aruba Central, which is our HPE GreenLake cloud control plane, is the industry's first AI-powered cloud native architecture designed to connect, protect and automate the edge. This gives customers a simple but powerful management tool to drive efficiencies in their business. And the 3 core layers of our portfolio each deliver specific benefits for customers. First, our unified infrastructure helps eliminate operational silos and streamline operations. We do this by bringing together wired, wireless and SD-WAN technologies across campus, branch, remote worker and data center locations into a single cloud native management and orchestration tool, and that's Aruba Central. Second, our Edge-to-Cloud security simplifies network security through a combination of built-in zero trust features focused on users, devices and IoT and a SASE integration framework that combines one edge functions and integration with third-party cloud-delivered security services. And third, our AI and automation software enables our customers to resolve issues quickly, ideally before they impact the business, while also helping IT departments operate more efficiently. We have a robust portfolio of products and solutions that deliver what our customers want and need to harness the power of the edge. And while we've seen fantastic growth in recent years, we are not standing still. We have the right strategy in place, and we'll continue to accelerate shareholder value by sustaining growth in core segments, expanding our overall TAM and gaining market share in key high-growth margin-rich areas. Back to you, Antonio.

Antonio Neri

executive
#5

HP is a pioneer in hybrid cloud, which represents our largest market opportunity. Recognizing the strategic importance of this market and our differentiated value proposition led by HP GreenLake, last month, we announced we will create a new hybrid cloud business unit at the start of fiscal year 2024. Established in this new segment reflects the maturity of our offering and set us apart from our peers. Our hybrid cloud business unit will bring together into a single hybrid cloud segment of storage and Compute-as-a-Service, all the offers related to that, inclusive of our HPE GreenLake private cloud and software solutions. Our updated operating model will enable greater focus and efficiency, faster execution and a superior cloud native experience for our customers and our partners. Our simplified operating model also incorporates a sales transformation to enhance the execution between our business units and our go-to-market function. Through these changes, we will engage customers more directly on the offerings they want the most. HP GreenLake is at the heart of our hybrid cloud strategy and offering. Its growth truly remarkable. At the end of Q3, we support 27,000 unique customer logos, and 3.4 million connected devices. Today, more than 1,100 partners transact HP GreenLake edge and hybrid cloud offerings showcasing HP GreenLake's incredible cloud strength and scale. HP GreenLake also plays a key role in expanding our gross margin, with software and services comprising an increasing portion of our ARR mix, now nearly at 70% at the end of Q3. Fidelma Russo, our Chief Technology Officer, has been leading our HP Relay Cloud platform development and will take on the responsibility of accelerating our hybrid cloud services growth opportunity when she becomes the General Manager of the new hybrid cloud business segment on November 1. I would like to invite her to talk about how we will enhance our leadership position in this growing market.

Fidelma Russo

executive
#6

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm honored to lead our future hybrid cloud business segment. which I believe will be a large and enduring growth engine for HPE and will create long-term shareholder value. Enterprises across the world are moving from a public cloud-first approach to a hybrid approach, and they've come to the realization that as their data grows and becomes more distributed in nature, it is neither scalable nor economical to rely solely on the public cloud. The emergence of generative AI has made this reality even more clear. And this creates a tremendous opportunity for us. Our new hybrid cloud business segment accelerates our participation in several large and attractive markets across storage, private cloud and infrastructure software. Combined, we are looking at a $160 billion-plus market that is highly profitable, and as enterprises continue to embrace hybrid, this market will see robust growth for the future. To capitalize on the market opportunity, our strategy is to take share in storage, scale private cloud with the momentum we have with HPE GreenLake and expand into infrastructure software. Ultimately, this strategy starts and ends with our customer. We offer the most differentiated customer value proposition among our competitors, including cloud providers. We have a growing portfolio of market-leading offerings and we are seeing strong customer adoption. As Antonio said, we are a pioneer and leader in hybrid cloud with HPE GreenLake. And the reason we've been successful and the reason we've been able to differentiate versus the public cloud is because when we show up to our customers, our mission is to solve 3 of their biggest challenges: transform their business through the power of data; modernize their IT infrastructure with a true cloud experience; and dramatically simplify the operations of their multi-generational and multi-cloud IT estates. Let me give you some more color on how we address each of these customer challenges and how different aspects of our portfolio come together to drive an integrated value proposition through the power of our GreenLake platform. Everything starts with data, which is the most valuable asset companies have. and it is at the center of any digital transformation. Its gravity and distributed nature are what drive enterprises to embrace the hybrid cloud. And this is why storage is foundational to our hybrid cloud strategy. With our HPE Alletra line of storage products, we offer customers a value proposition none of our competitors can match. We have engineered a truly modern scalable platform with unified support for block and file that is capable of meeting the most demanding requirements for AI. It has been engineered for a true hybrid cloud experience, and it's made possible with an architecture that's built from the ground up to be cloud native and software-defined. We continue to deliver industry-leading uptime and resilience enabled by our market-leading AIOps capabilities. And since its launch, HPE Alletra has seen the fastest customer adoption of any storage platform in HPE history. In addition to our product leadership, we are also increasing investments in our go-to-market, both in our direct sales force and in the channel. And with these investments, we are poised to take share from our competitors. But not only are customers trusting us with their data. They are also trusting HPE to build, and in many cases, operate their hybrid cloud infrastructure on top of their data through HPE GreenLake. Our entire strategy around HPE GreenLake is built on 3 foundational beliefs which differentiate us from the public cloud: first, customers should not have to choose between the agility of the public cloud and the performance and control of their private infrastructure; second, customers want choice and freedom from lock-in; and third, they operate multigenerational multivendor IT estates that need to coexist with the public cloud. Over the last 5 years, we have built a multibillion-dollar HPE GreenLake franchise, and it is the envy of our competitors. And we are continuing to double down on that success. This year, we added a host of new cloud native offerings and capabilities, including hybrid multi-cloud orchestration for virtual machines, containers, and bare metal; a full suite of private cloud offerings that enable customers to self-manage or choose a fully managed experience; and a portfolio of world-class AI infrastructure delivered as a service. The portfolio clearly resonates with customers, and it is allowing us to extend our market leadership. Now we understand that the adoption of hybrid introduces several operational challenges for our customers. And through a curated strategy of organic investments and acquisitions, we have built a compelling set of SaaS offerings aimed at helping customers simplify the data management and protection of their hybrid multi-cloud environment while reducing the risk of public cloud lock-in. We have focused on 3 critical customer needs: AI-powered monitoring and observability for day 2 operations and beyond through our acquisition of OpsRamp; unified data access through our HPE Ezmeral data and analytics suite, and that helps customers move and transform their data for use in AI and other applications; and then data life cycle management and protection through our suite of offerings, including Zerto disaster recovery. All of our software is built for hybrid to give our customers the flexibility they need to simplify their hybrid cloud operations at any location. Our offers support multivendor, multicloud environments and enable native integrations for both HPE GreenLake and major public clouds. Our strategy with our HPE GreenLake SaaS offerings is to drive aggressive penetration across our customer base. All of our hybrid cloud offerings: storage, private cloud and SaaS as well as HPE Aruba Networking and HPE Compute offerings are natively delivered through our HPE GreenLake cloud platform, and we will deliver our AI offers natively on the platform over the next couple of years. The platform enables our customers to have a consistent cloud-based management experience across all our offerings. It provides a set of essential services, including consumption analytics and a sustainability dashboard that helps customers understand and reduce their carbon footprint. And as more customers adopt our cloud platform, they are reaping the operational benefits of a truly unified cloud-based management model, which reduces upfront CapEx and ongoing OpEx running costs. And the more HPE offerings our customers consume through HPE GreenLake, the bigger the operational benefit they gain and the higher the value we have generated for our shareholders. So to bring our differentiation to life, I'd like to share a couple of examples of how our customers are leveraging HPE's hybrid cloud portfolio to solve their business challenges. For those of you who have a great time watching football, you will be glad to know the Dallas Cowboys were looking for a solution to allow their players and coaches to watch and analyze video footage across different locations, and our high-performance Alletra storage solution with multisite replication perfectly suited their needs. Danfoss loved the managed for you aspect of our private cloud solution. and it allows them to focus on delivering business innovation globally while reducing their carbon footprint. So there's no question that HPE GreenLake is winning in the market, and hybrid cloud is the driving force behind it. We're seeing tremendous adoption with our customers and partners with more than 27,000 unique customers using the HPE GreenLake platform. We are creating significant shareholder value because we are expanding our infrastructure offerings into new and higher-growth markets. Our recurring revenues are growing at more than a 35% CAGR, which is faster than the public cloud, and we are delivering greater profitability through our software and services rich portfolio. In closing, HPE has a winning hybrid cloud strategy. We have a highly differentiated value proposition that is grounded in a deep understanding of our customers' evolving needs with respect to data, infrastructure modernization and hybrid cloud operations. The differentiation comes from being a pioneer in as a service with HPE GreenLake, our unrivaled HPE Edge-to-Cloud portfolio, and it's further enhanced by years of curated M&A, organic investment in our SaaS portfolio and our HPE GreenLake platform. The value proposition is clearly resonating with our customers, and our continued success will fuel sustained growth and profit expansion for our shareholders. Now back to Antonio. Thank you.

Antonio Neri

executive
#7

Well, thank you, Fidelma. Excited to have Fidelma now lead this great opportunity we have in hybrid cloud. Just as we have a very differentiated hybrid cloud value proposition, we are also uniquely positioned with a compelling high-performance computing NII offering as this market dramatically expands. The market's extreme acceleration in the last year and anticipated growth over the next several years reflects the enterprise realization that they must embrace AI or they will lose their competitiveness and get left behind. As organizations lean into AI, they are discovering a few things. First, the data intensity of the AI workloads require a hybrid by-design solution rather than a cloud-only approach. They need a solution across the entire AI life cycle from training to tuning to inferencing. And given the energy and data center services required for large-scale AI workloads, sustainability must be built into the technology from the start. HP addresses these needs with an end-to-end portfolio designed for the full spectrum of use cases spanning large-scale AI model development, training and inferencing as well as unique liquid cooling data center services expertise. Customers are attracted to HPE's market-leading supercomputing capabilities, differentiated network and interconnect IP, AI-specific software and services expertise. These capabilities position us favorably in our rapidly-growing total addressable market comprising HPC and supercompute in AI infrastructure and AI platform software. Our pursuit of an outside share of this market opportunity will deliver real value to shareholders, especially with our path to AI-driven profitability chartered in the next fiscal year. Our investments in our unique silicon and software are expected to drive a larger profitable revenue base. I would like to welcome Justin Hotard, who leads our HPC and AI segment, to discuss how we plan to capitalize on the booming AI opportunity. Justin?

Unknown Executive

executive
#8

Thank you, Antonio. AI is driving the next wave of investment in innovation, resulting in value creation in the IT market and the global economy. It will have a transformative impact, similar to what we saw with web, mobile and cloud. And we are seeing demand shift dramatically as our customers realize the potential of AI to deliver business transformation. Today, I want to make sure I cover three points with you. First, the AI market is growing rapidly, and HPE is well positioned to profitably capture that market expansion. Second, we have a right to play and win in AI and we're already winning in the market today. We already are seeing this in our sales pipeline, in our orders and our revenue. Third, we deliver solutions for the AI life cycle across training, tuning and inferencing that will drive higher growth and margin expansion. AI adoption is fueling significant market growth. We're targeting three areas of the AI market: supercomputing; the AI infrastructure; and AI software platform. As you can see, our total addressable market for these segments will grow at nearly 24% CAGR to $146 billion by 2026. By focusing on these areas, we are empowering customers to transform their businesses to dramatically enhance productivity, accelerate innovation and create new revenue models. Let me cover each in depth. First, supercomputing. HPE is a market leader in delivering the world's leading supercomputing and high-performance computing solutions. We hold the #1 position of performance share for the world's 500 fastest supercomputers and deliver the majority of the world's top 10 most efficient supercomputers. Our leadership positions us to continue to capture share in the markets forecasted double-digit growth. We will continue to invest in our supercomputing technology and leverage our global service delivery footprint. The second is the AI infrastructure market. By 2026, this market is expected to be 7x larger than our core supercomputing market and reached $86 billion. A significant amount of this growth will be driven by AI model training, which is one of the most computationally intense workloads of our time. Customers require powerful infrastructure, capable of the scale and performance that supercomputing technologies deliver. For this reason, key features of supercomputing technologies, including management software, networking and liquid cooling will become requirements for AI infrastructure. These are technologies where HPE has unique intellectual property that positions us to deliver differentiated solutions to customers. Third, we have an opportunity above the infrastructure layer in the AI software platform market. This market is expected to grow to $49 billion by 2026, and we plan to capture share through continued investment and innovation. We will extend our current software suite and invest in new offerings to specifically target market opportunities across the entire AI life cycle. As this portion of our portfolio grows, we anticipate healthy margins that will be accretive to our business. We believe our strategy to focus on these three segments across the AI life cycle of training, tuning and inferencing will lead to increased market share in two ways: first, through our core supercomputing business and trusted global brand will create new opportunities and expand our share of wallet within our existing customer base; and second, by further building on these core offerings with purpose-built AI solutions and HPE's global presence, we expect to attract new customers to win even more market share. In fact, it's the combination of the market opportunities across supercomputing, AI infrastructure and the AI software platform that differentiates HPE from the competition. Now let me transition and cover how the growing AI market will be driven by compute and data-intensive workloads, and we'll need an architecture that HPE is uniquely positioned to provide. This AI native architecture is different from the cloud architecture. Traditional cloud architectures are optimized to run multiple workloads on a single server. They were not designed with AI in mind. There are four key attributes of an AI-native architecture. First, the architecture should be designed with computing and infrastructure that is at the scale of supercomputing to take full advantage of computing capacity. This is essential to train, retrain and tune AI models using large quantities of data with efficiency speed and accuracy to accelerate time to value. Second, ensuring a truly hybrid design provides the flexibility to train, tune and deploy AI models in any environment. Customers need the flexibility to integrate data that exists in the public cloud, the private cloud and the edge. For example, enterprises need to deploy inferencing where they can deliver real-time insights. This will be necessary for large language models as enterprise use cases scale, just as it already is for computer vision applications across autonomous driving and medical imaging. Third, an open hardware and software ecosystem delivers strong advantages. Having an open AI ecosystem expands training and inferencing market solutions to accelerate adoption for customers and support ongoing innovation in the broader ecosystem. And fourth, these architectures must be sustainable by design. By 2028, it's estimated that AI workloads will grow at a 35% CAGR and require about 20 gigawatts of power within data centers. Customers will need an architecture satisfies this demand at a new level of energy efficiency to minimize the impact of their carbon footprint. HPE is uniquely positioned to deliver this new AI native architecture through our technology differentiation and expertise. For many years, we've made strategic investments in AI and led AI-focused research in Hewlett Packard Labs. As a part of this, we have a powerful blend of strong technology, intellectual property, expertise and talent to deliver an AI-native architecture. This positions us to be a long-term market leader and to capture market share in the nearly $150 billion AI TAM I previously highlighted. Our multiyear investment plan targets three distinct areas to enhance our differentiated position in the market that will set us apart from the competition. These include software high-performance networking and supercomputing infrastructure. We expect these investments to significantly expand our HPEC and AI business segment operating margins by 2026. First, our machine learning development platform has proven to train quickly, efficiently and at scale to create reliable and accurate models that can make valuable predictions and reduce business risk. With our current software and the investments we're making across the AI life cycle, we will deliver a robust platform of open source software. This software stack also integrates with the HPE Ezmeral data fabric that Fidelma covered in her overview. By integrating the two platforms, we're making it easy for customers to manage their entire data life cycle. Second, we deliver Ethernet-based high-performance networking with HPE Slingshot, which is purpose-built and proven for significant AI scaling. This technology currently powers Frontier, the world's fastest supercomputer with nearly 40,000 GPUs at the United States Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. HPE Slingshot will also power the upcoming Aurora exascale supercomputer, which features more than 60,000 GPUs and Argon National Laboratory. HPE Slingshot connects all GPUs to operate as one single large supercomputer. This makes it possible to train trillion parameter AI models in one single instance. HPE Slingshot is built upon the Ethernet standard. And it already supports a variety of GPUs and accelerators, including those from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel. This creates market options for customers' training needs as the market continues to scale. And finally, to support the reliability and resiliency of AI systems required for large-scale training. We offer powerful and integrated supercomputing solutions to address these needs. These include our expertise in system integration and our supercomputing software. As a part of our supercomputing infrastructure, we have extensive experience in R&D that focuses on sophisticated liquid cooling solutions. Liquid cooling is essential to deliver sustainable data center infrastructure for AI. Our solutions can drive up to a 20% performance improvement per kilowatt over air core solutions and consume 15% less power. Further, we believe next-generation accelerators will require liquid cooling in every system to meet power and thermal demands. Our intellectual property and liquid cooling infrastructure and our advanced manufacturing capabilities in this area position us well to capture this demand. However, technology alone is not sufficient. Customers training AI models don't have the time to develop the expertise to operate their AI infrastructure and platform. This is an opportunity that positions us to offer unique innovations like a virtual private cloud for AI with HPE GreenLake for large language models that we announced in June. This is a turnkey cloud service that integrates our AI infrastructure and AI software platform for model training, where we see significant global demand. The service is also designed to lower carbon footprint. As I covered, our intellectual property in AI has proven, and it positions us well to accelerate innovation in the market. This is why customers from various verticals are turning to us. I'd like to point out a couple of examples that illustrate how our AI-focused solutions are making a transformative impact in the market today. We have a strong partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and its national laboratories to co-design and codevelop powerful supercomputers. As we have with exascale to accelerate national initiatives in AI-driven science and innovation. Argon National Laboratory, for example, is creating a series of generative AI models at the exascale level that will be trained on HPEC supercomputers. In the pharmaceutical industry, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a leading tech bio company uses advancements in AI to accelerate and industrialize the discovery of new drugs. Recursion uses the HPE machine learning development environment to manage its large-scale AI training jobs on its AI supercomputer. This software significantly speeds up model training across more than 25 petabytes of biological and chemical data and improves team collaboration. Customers like Taiga Cloud and Crusoe Energy partner with us to leverage our expertise and global supercomputing leadership to deliver full stack solutions that integrate our industry-leading infrastructure, open source software and on-site services. And our supercomputers and AI software also behind the work of foundation model builders that create prebuilt models used by broader enterprises. For example, Alfalfa has built a powerful large language model in five languages, using HPE supercomputers and machine learning development platform. This large language model is already used today as an advanced AI digital assistant across banks, automotive manufacturers, legal firms to accelerate business outcomes. They turned to HPE to scale their training capabilities in a virtual cloud versus relying on deploying and managing their own supercomputer and software. As our launch customer for HPE GreenLake for large language models, Alfalfa will extend their customer reach globally and accelerate their growth. As this business scales, the combination of top line growth and higher-margin offerings within our portfolio will help us achieve double-digit operating margins. AI is a fast-growing market that will be fundamental to transforming businesses and accelerating economic growth. We believe we are well positioned to profitably capture the market opportunity and win in AI to drive higher growth and margin expansion. With our trusted expertise differentiated IP and long-term sustained market leadership, we can capture significant value from the AI market. This is an exciting opportunity for our company, and we look forward to fueling the value creation from AI for our customers and in turn for our shareholders. And now let me turn it back over to Antonio.

Antonio Neri

executive
#9

All right. Well, thank you, Justin. Each of these areas have -- we just presented to provide our customers and our shareholders with tremendous opportunity. And the engine that powers our ability to capture that opportunity is compute, which produces cash flow to invest in our business and deliver direct capital return to our shareholders. As you well know, there is a cyclical nature to the compute business. Over the last several years, digital transformation drove increased investment to modernize infrastructure. And our customers are focused on digesting those investments. We will be very intentional about how we execute and compute during this cycle to maintain our scale and industry-leading profitability. We are focusing on capturing every unit while maintaining balance in our operating margin performance. We are capturing opportunities in a steady compute market from cloud repatriation from edge and IoT or loads, demand from the telco and 5G sector and service providers and from the merger needs from AI inferencing solutions, Justin talked about that. We expect continued demand next year for service with now GPUs and other compute accelerator types. Combined with our shift to HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers, which delivers significant greater performance compared to the previous generation we anticipate a tailwind in compute average unit price in fiscal year 2024. We will measure our progress in part to tracking the servers we sell with accelerated processing units or APUs. That is because customers can use a variety of compute accelerators beyond just GPUs to support AI wall loads. We have a complete compute portfolio to address the entire AI life cycle across training, tuning and inferencing. We also continue to see strong interest in our HPE services, which is additive to both revenue and margin. Our world-class HPE services team help us to deliver great customer experience and customers can gain maximum benefit from HP GreenLake, from our software, designing and building their infrastructure and running their hybrid IT estates with one exceptional end-to-end customer experience. Just as a compute service engine to power accelerator growth, HPE Financial Services continue to be a critical competitive advantage for HPE. This business create smarter IT life cycle solutions for our customers and partners through offers that combine insights, financial expertise and deep rooted focus on sustainable IT. It is also strategically important for us as we increase our other service business to HP GreenLake. Customers can transition to HP GreenLake using our asset life cycle management services, to assess -- to access efficient technology and cloud consumption models creating value for our business. Going forward, we see even higher demand from our customers as they put more emphasis on finding ways to accelerate their sustainability goals through our services and the circular economy solutions. For our investors, HP Financial Services offerings and its best-in-class return on equity provide a great source of profit that expand our earnings. In addition to driving impressive organic innovation across our portfolio, we continue to be opportunistic in making the right acquisitions. So far this year, we have acquired five businesses to accelerate our strategy and enhance our capabilities. When we assess opportunities to make organic and inorganic investments, we focus on the potential to drive higher level of recurring revenue and profitability. We maintain particular interest, an investment to help us innovate and grow profitably at the edge in hybrid cloud and AI. We will continue to be opportunistic in making beneficial and accretive acquisitions while following our disciplined return-based framework and ensuring integration success. Jeremy will address more specific on the long-term sustainable value creation and free cash flow generation objectives we pursue on behalf of our shareholders. When I reflect on HPE's strong business momentum, I'm particularly proud that a great deal of the strength come from solutions to help customers advance their important environmental, social and governance objectives. In fact, in fiscal year 2022 alone, we generated about $1.3 billion in net revenue that we can directly attribute to sustainability engagements with customers. In addition, our portfolio enhances opportunity for customers to achieve their environmental goals. I am very proud that HPE is one of the only two global IT companies. to have a net zero target of 2040 or sooner, approved by the science-based target initiative. Last year, we had the submission directly within our control by more than 1/3 from the 2020 baseline and reduced our overall carbon intensity by 2% year-over-year. We also believe a diverse and engaged workforce fuels innovation and performance. Since 2017, our employee engagement score has risen 20 percentage points to 83%. And while we have work to do and so the entire IT industry, I am proud of our progress in diversifying our workforce. Our U.S. workforce is 32% ethnically diverse and more than 26% of executive positions worldwide are held by women at HPE. We also have a very diverse Board of Directors. Half or our independent directors are female, and we are innovating with a strong ethical compass. We win the right way. In the last year, we have put in place even more comprehensive governance around AI to enable us to size the opportunity, this technology processes in the right way. We have the right strategy aligned with the key market megatrends. We have the right team with strong focus on delivering business outcomes for our customers. And while the world is navigating uncertainty, we are confident HPE will continue to accelerate value for our shareholders. To speak about shareholder value creation, Jeremy Cox will take the stage after a short break. As you know, Jeremy serving as our interim Chief Financial Officer, while we continue our internal and external search for our permanent CFO. And we will be back on stage as soon as the market close. Thank you for your time and attention. [Break]

Operator

operator
#10

Please welcome Senior Vice President and Interim Chief Financial Officer, Jeremy Cox.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#11

All right. Well, good afternoon, and welcome back. I hope you guys enjoyed your break. As an 18-year veteran of HPE, it's a privilege to be serving as the interim CFO. And I'm very happy to be with all of you guys today. Now that our leaders have presented our vision, strategy and differentiation, let me translate that into our financial thesis and our commitments. We'll demonstrate how pivoting our mix to higher growth, higher margin and recurring revenue is accelerating value creation for our shareholders. My main goal today is to help you understand how our strategy will deliver additional value through sustainable, profitable growth and increased capital returns. We're pleased with our progress throughout FY '23. We've managed through some ongoing macroeconomic challenges, yet our business is performing well. We're reiterating our Q4 guidance for revenue of $7.2 billion to $7.5 billion, and our FY '23 guidance for revenue growth of 4% to 6% in constant currency. We expect currency to be approximately a 300 basis point headwind for the year. We're also reiterating our Q4 and FY '23 non-GAAP EPS guidance. We continue to expect Q4 non-GAAP diluted net EPS of $0.48 to $0.52 and FY '23, non-GAAP diluted net EPS of $2.11 to $2.15. We also reiterate our free cash flow guidance of $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion. Given our business performance and the scale of opportunity in front of us, we have chosen to make some targeted investments in Q4 to accelerate our pivot in Intelligent Edge, hybrid cloud and HPEC and AI, which we've offset with higher OI&E than we originally expected. We've also incurred some additional GAAP expense within our cost optimization plan, including certain real estate charges, which we don't expect to be meaningful in future periods. Consequently, our full year GAAP and non-GAAP operating profit will be slightly lower than our guidance with non-GAAP operating profit growth to be approximately 4% versus our prior guidance of 6% to 7%. FY '23 GAAP EPS is now expected to be $1.42 to $1.46. We are accelerating these investments and yet remaining within our long-term financial framework where we continue to expect non-GAAP operating profit to grow faster than revenue over our outlook period. So our strategy at HPE is definitely accelerating value creation for our shareholders. We are improving our growth and margin profile by shifting our mix towards higher growth and higher-margin segments. We're adding as-a-service software and service revenue across all of our segments. And our capital allocation strategy balances investments to drive further long-term revenue and growth in our free cash flow and consistently return capital to our shareholders. So here's how you can expect to see the stronger mix come through in our financials over the next 3 years. We expect our growth businesses, our Intelligent Edge, hybrid cloud and HPEC and AI segments will contribute increasingly more revenue to HPE, and the combination should exceed 50% of our total segment revenue by FY '26. Already for FY '23, they should be more than 45% of our total segment revenue. That's an increase from approximately 40% in FY '22. And our operating profit trajectory is even more dramatic. We expect the mix of total segment operating profit from these segments to reach over 60% in FY '26. And that continues our recent trend. We expect to see our growth businesses approximately 45% of total segment operating profit in FY '23 driven largely by improvements in the intelligent edge compared to under 30% in FY '22. HPE GreenLake is a key element of our portfolio mix shift with healthy customer demand. Continued ARR growth means our as-a-service products will represent more than a significant percentage of overall revenue and at richer gross margins. We are rolling forward our long-term ARR target CAGR by 1 year through FY '26 and thus reiterating our commitment to 35% to 45% CAGR growth. This puts ARR on track to more than double and reach approximately 10% of our revenue by FY '26. In our new segment structure, we'll continue to disclose ARR in the same way. ARR growth is set to drive further gross margin expansion for the company. Gross margins for our as-a-service offerings are already meaningfully higher than the same products and services sold through a transactional CapEx model. And as we build momentum in standard offerings and SaaS, our mix of high-margin software and services within our ARR has risen to 61% in FY '22 to 68% in the most recent quarter, and should reach the mid- to upper 70% range in FY '26. So let me step back and discuss how that rising mix of software and service revenue appears in a representative HPE GreenLake deal. This compute and storage HPE customer opted to purchase HPE GreenLake in lieu of a transactional CapEx deal. The deal had a normal profile of revenue growth, margins and term length. Customers in a transactional model typically over-provision hardware capacity and purchase at lower amount of revenue from software and services attached. We have normalized the software and services revenue in this deal example at $100. This HPE GreenLake customer was happy with the flexibility to purchase less capacity to start though with more than twice as much software and services revenue. These additional services delivered an improved experience in operational savings for the customer. Over time, rising usage led the customer to increase its spending with HPE and including 3x as much software and services revenue at a similar hardware level. The GreenLake model meant we received more high-margin revenue over the deal life cycle. And it created a happy customer. who's likely to stick with us as our annual customer churn is only 3%. Along with higher software and services contribution, the rising usage also pulls through additional hardware. And we get another bite at the apple when the customer decides to replace their hardware. Our HPFS life cycle management business enables us to repurpose the fleet of depreciated assets into other customers. There, this lowers their costs and thus increases our margins. So the bottom line, HPE GreenLake drives a better value for our shareholders through higher revenue, margins and customer retention for HPE. And our end markets and product sets are evolving. Our new segment structure effective November 1 and will improve our portfolio alignment and accelerate our go-to-market motion. We'll report our Q1 '24 results under the new structure. And prior to Q1 earnings, you can be assured we plan to file restated historical segment financials for the new reporting structure. While there are several product lines and shifts between existing segments, for various optimization purposes, most of the changes are not overly material to the financials of the existing segments. The more material change is establishing the hybrid cloud segment, which Fidelma spoke to earlier. It combines the existing storage segment and the as-a-service compute business and the software business previously reported in our corporate investment and other segment. So now let me take you into a deep dive of our current segments. You've heard we expect megatrends in edge, hybrid cloud and AI to drive our TAM to rise higher than $340 billion by 2026. In the coming slides, I'll show the financial goals of each of our segments. We'll also provide a table of TAMs by our existing segments in the appendix for your reference. The edge in networking TAM is growing at a 10% CAGR to $94 billion by 2026. The portion addressable by our Intelligent Edge segment is growing in the mid-single digits, and our business is performing well above this. We delivered 53% year-over-year constant currency revenue growth in Q3 '23. And expanded our operating margin by more than 1,300 basis points to 29.7%. Last year at SAM, we talked about the mid-20% range by FY '25. Well, we're ahead of schedule on operating margin. However, we're keeping this mid-20 operating margin target for this segment for the outlook period. Improving supply is now allowing us to make progress against our order book and deliver on deals we won in prior periods. We are confident that the combination of share gains and the expanded TAM that Phil mentioned, will allow us to continue to outgrow our end markets. We expect revenue growth to be in the low double digits from FY '22 to FY '26, a figure that's front-end loaded given our growth this year. And I also want to highlight our as a Service business in the intelligent edge, such as Aruba Central and security because it's now both sizable and growing rapidly. As growth here continues, we will see more of a trade-off between current period revenue and future period revenue. Such strong growth in FY '23 sets a high bar for comparison in FY '24. Even so, we expect FY '24 revenue to be slightly up relative to FY '23. We're forecasting a continued tailwind to revenue in the first part of FY '24 from our significant order book. Our HPE GreenLake and storage portfolios are well positioned to capture the TAM growth we expect to see in the hybrid cloud, where we expect to see the TAM to grow at a 7% CAGR and to $164 billion in 2026. We estimate the TAM for storage alone will grow at a 3% CAGR to reach $66 billion in 2026. We believe we'll grow at market rates from FY '22 to FY '26. We haven't included significant AI contribution in our growth outlook, but we do believe AI will pull through storage demand. Our revenue driver in storage will be ongoing strength of our HPE Electra product line, which has grown in triple digits pace over the last 5 quarters to numbers that are no longer small. Also as a service is now the fastest-growing portion of the business and like Intelligent Edge, trade some current period revenue for future period revenue. Our SaaS business growth is one reason we expect operating margins to improve to the mid-teens range in the outlook period for this segment, which will be evident in the operating margin structure of the new hybrid cloud segment over the same period. We have a significant opportunity in HPI with AI as we're seeing great momentum through the overall HPEC and AI segment. We expect the AI TAM to grow at a 24% CAGR to $146 billion by 2026. We estimate the HPEC and supercomputing TAM, which this segment addresses directly, will grow at a 22% CAGR to $78 billion in 2026. So we talked about AI activity after Q1. We talked about wins after Q2 and order book after Q3 when HPC and AI order book rose to more than $3 billion. We recognized a modest amount of AI revenue in Q3, and we expect a similar amount in Q4. However, given the specific interest in AI demand, we will begin to report a new metric. Total HPE orders booked that include accelerated processing units or APUs. APU includes GPU-based orders within both the HPEC and AI and compute segments. However, HPEC and AI represents the large majority. Year-to-date, total HPU, HPE APU orders are over $3 billion. This metric captures all APU orders across a range of suppliers. We expect the strength of our order book and the pipeline opportunities we see in front of us to drive near- and long-term growth. We forecast solid double-digit revenue growth in the HPEC and AI segment between FY '22 and FY '26. For modeling purposes, you can assume for now this CAGR will be front-end loaded. We said it last year, Sam, that we expect this business to carry a double-digit operating margin over time. While we've been investing and we'll continue to invest in AI, as we can see in our demand growth, our long-term expectation for this margin structure has not changed. We continue to expect approximately 10% operating margin by FY '26. Operating margin improvement is a focus for this business as Justin noted, when we expect to benefit from an increasing investment in software and continued learnings for the supply -- from the supply chain challenges to improve supercomputing execution, gross margins and capital intensity. While it's early days, our commercial AI wins on average, have come at margins above typical -- above levels typically commanded for relevant product lines. And you know this business benefits from scale, which AI demand is absolutely supercharging. Our compute business is a steady value contributor to HPE and it continues to be a critical component of our overall company scale. We estimate the compute TAM at $63 billion in 2026, excluding the Tier 1 market where we have chosen to limit our presence. We expect the market to grow at 4% through 2026, but to be mostly flat when excluding China. We're preparing for growth in the inference market and are expecting to capture that upside through this segment. Earlier this year, we introduced several AI optimized and GPU-intensive HPE proline Gen11 servers. However, we're not yet embedding significantly above normal GPU, a growth for inferencing in our revenue outlook. If or more likely when such growth does materialize, our product portfolio between HPEC and AI and compute is well positioned to capture the entire life cycle of opportunities from tuning or training to tuning to inferencing. We remain focused on capturing profitable unit share with stable revenues while managing our long-term and market-leading operating margin target of 11% to 13%. This includes an assumption that component costs will rise in FY '24. Let me also reiterate that our compute segment comprises a portion of our total -- our HPE's total server revenue. We also recognized server revenue in our HPC and AI segment. We expect HPE's combined server revenue to deliver mid-single-digit growth in FY '24 to approximately $16 billion. HPFS remains a steady and strategic driver of healthy returns on equity across economic cycles and it facilitates our as-a-service pivot in multiple ways. This segment is particularly critical as a support for our HPE GreenLake business because it creates investment capacity for our customers. It supports our as-a-Service pivot with its best-in-class life cycle asset management business. The fleet management concept is becoming way more powerful as customers' mindsets are shifting from paying for specific equipment to paying for capacity. We expect the business to sustain a mid-teens return on equity with a mid-single-digit revenue growth, CAGR and an upper single-digit operating margin through FY '26. This revenue growth is slightly above our long-term trend given the rising interest rate environment. Okay. Let's translate that into a multiyear financial outlook. Our 3-year revenue CAGR is expected to be 2% to 4% in constant currency. This outlook incorporates the current macroeconomic picture and FX risk and considers a revenue base revenue-based year that benefited from an order book consumption, which means we expect demand growth to be above revenue growth in FY '24. We are incorporating significant further growth in AI demand beyond what we have current line of sight to. We expect non-GAAP diluted net EPS CAGR of 3% to 5%. Our structural non-GAAP effective tax rate is 15% from 14% in FY '23, largely due to removing H3C earnings from our pretax non-GAAP earnings. Excluding H3C and the tax rate change, we forecast our non-GAAP diluted net EPS CAGR to be 7% to 9%. And our philosophy remains that we will grow our operating profits faster than revenue. We expect our mix shift, including as a Service revenue and the rising profitability on that revenue to be strong contributors to our operating profit growth over this time. Our mix shift to higher growth revenue has lifted our visibility into free cash flows. As a result, we're increasing the amount of free cash flow we intend to return to shareholders to approximately 65% to 75% between FY '24 and FY '26. Above our recent historical target return of between 50% and 60%. This includes a combination of targeted dividend increases and larger share repurchases. But we'll be thoughtful around the target on both directions given we'll continue to follow our returns-based framework. And for cash flow. We expect our FY '24 free cash flow to be between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion. That guidance is flat year-over-year with our current FY '23 guidance. However, it's important to note, FY '24 free cash flow will rise 10% year-over-year when adjusting for approximately $200 million in cash flow we received from H3C and FY '23. This year-over-year improvement on an adjusted basis will be driven by lower cost, lower cash transformation costs. We also expect improving working capital, although the surge and capital-intensive AI slightly constrains us for now. Importantly, we expect free cash flow growth to significantly exceed net income growth over the next 3 years. Our conversion of non-GAAP net earnings to free cash flow is steadily improving, as you can see on our slide. We are on track for approximately 70% in FY '23, a sustained improvement from FY '21 and or FY '22, FY '21 and FY '20, and we expect to reach approximately 90% by FY '26. Let's now turn to our FY '24 outlook. We expect revenue growth of 2% to 4% in constant currency and FX to be a modest 50 to 100 basis point headwind. We're expecting AI demand to be a key driver to above-trend HPEC and AI segment growth and Intelligent Edge revenue to be slightly up year-over-year. Non-GAAP gross margins is forecasted to remain in the 35% range, continued contributions from the Intelligent Edge storage and HPE GreenLake are to balance the pressure on compute gross margins after an above-trend FY '23. We are prioritizing investments in higher growth opportunities we talked about today. Balance with cost discipline and lower growth businesses. For modeling purposes, you can expect OIE to be approximately negative $300 million. We expect our structural non-GAAP tax rate to be approximate -- to be 15%. So GAAP diluted net EPS is expected to be between $1.83 and $2.03. And non-GAAP diluted net EPS is to be between $1.82 and $2.02. Finally, we plan to generate FY '24 free cash flow of between $1.9 billion and $2.1 billion. This does place us below our initial plan of more than $6.5 billion between FY '22 and FY '24. The biggest changes to our assumptions are: one, we no longer are assuming cash flow from H3C; and two, robust AI growth suggests supply chain and working capital won't normalize as planned. We expect free cash flow to follow our typical seasonal pattern of negative in the first half of the year and significantly positive in the second half of the year. And we intend to increase our dividend by 8% in FY '24 and given our rising confidence in free cash flow. We expect our FY '24 corporate performance to be weighted to the back half of the year. While we are expecting the first half to benefit from normalizing order book in the Intelligent Edge business, our HPC and AI revenue growth will likely be governed by GPU availability well into FY '24. Our non-GAAP diluted net EPS is expected to grow by 4% from a normalized level. The bridge between the midpoints of our FY '23 and FY '24, non-GAAP diluted net EPS and includes a few nonoperational headwinds I'll walk you through. The H3C put exercise creates a $0.17 non-GAAP EPS headwind. We are not planning to accrue dividends from H3C in FY '24 nor will we report H3C earnings in our non-GAAP income in FY '24. However, we're required to continue to include GAAP income and [in-GAAP] income, our proportionate amount of H3C earnings generated in FY '24, while we still own the interest. We continue to expect to receive H3C cash proceeds in the first half of the calendar year '24. Other OI&E is likely to be a $0.10 headwind. We benefited in FY '23 from FX hedging and other gains and interest rates are higher. As I mentioned, our structural non-GAAP tax rate is forecasted to be 15% in FY '24, and this equates to a $0.02 headwind in EPS. And again, is largely attributable to removing H3C earnings from our pretax non-GAAP income. We also have some operational headwinds in the coming year, including normalizing margin structure in compute segment following order book consumption during FY '23 and planned investments in our growth businesses. The combination should reach approximately $0.34 at the midpoint of our guidance range. However, we intend to more than offset these headwinds with operational improvements and revenue growth, specifically in our higher growth, higher-margin businesses and ongoing efficiency gains. Operating margin target gains should be particularly evident in our HEPC and AI and storage segments. And as you know, we follow a disciplined returns-based framework to ensure we maximize shareholder value. Our rigorous investment evaluation process balance is investments for growth with capital returns to shareholders. Our top priorities are investing to capture high return opportunities while remaining committed to dividends, opportunistic and material share repurchases and retaining our investment-grade credit rating. Our acquisitions, going back to Aruba networking and more recently to OpsRamp, Athene and access security have followed our disciplined ROI-based framework. We are confident in our ability to grow organic revenue, EPS and free cash flow, with the premise of our M&A to be -- to accelerate the growth with acquisitions that are value accretive. We are expecting to receive a significant amount of cash when our H3C deal closes. And we'll update you with our plans for that cash at that time. However, we do not intend to hold excess cash over the long term, though some reserve is prudent in uncertain economic times or during the technology inflections such as the AI. So let me close with a recap of our financial messages. We see healthy growth in the IT industry, and we have products across our portfolio that leave us very well positioned to capture that growth. As a result, our expectation is for sustainable 2% to 4% revenue growth in constant currency. And we're pivoting our portfolio to higher growth, higher margin revenue, led by our efforts in the edge, HPE GreenLake, HP Electric Storage and AI. We intend to expand operating profit faster than revenue over the outlook period, which translates to a 3% to 5% non-GAAP net diluted EPS growth or 7% to 9% normalized for our H3C divestiture and tax rate change. Finally, we expect free cash flow growth in excess of net income growth. This gives us line of sight to increase our target percentage of free cash flow return to our shareholders to 65% to 75%. It also gives us a target. It also allows us to target an 8% increase in our dividend in FY '24. I thoroughly enjoy working more closely with all of our business unit leaders in the last couple of months as we finalize our FY '24 plan. And I have great confidence that our thoughtful strategy will provide very attractive investment returns. We look forward to your questions and feedback in a bit. But first, let me turn it back over to Antonio to close this out.

Antonio Neri

executive
#12

All right. Well, thank you, Jeremy. We believe we have presented a clear case for the compelling value on HPE will deliver to our shareholders. With a total addressable market opportunity growing at about 1.4x, I am confident in our ability to capture that opportunity in a way that delivers for investors for several key reasons. First, while some macroeconomic challenges remain, I'm optimistic about demand. HPE is more relevant than ever because we have innovated in the categories that are most important to our customers now and in the future. Second, we have made very sound investment choices over the last 5 years to pivot our portfolio to adverse set of businesses with greater profitability potential and they are paying off. As we unlock greater growth from these markets, our investors are poised to share in higher returns. Finally, we have an experienced and passionate leadership team who execute with vision, a sense of urgency and our commitment to culture. Our company recognizes the need now more than ever to continue investing in our workforce to attract and retain the necessary talent to execute on the growth strategy we communicated today. As we left some stage last year, I shared with you that HPE does not wait for the next big thing to happen. We accelerate what comes next for our customers, our company and our shareholders. Our foresight and spirit of innovation has always served us well and position us to realize the full benefit of what is in the horizon for us and for our industry. We expect HPE to capitalize on the opportunity we discussed here today at the edge, hybrid cloud and the exciting opportunity that AI presents. We believe strongly in the long-term profitability potential of HPE and what we offer as an investment opportunity. I would like now to take your questions. We will give the crew a little bit of time here to reset the stage, and then we will invite the presenters back on stage so we can take your questions. And also the audience on the webcast can submit questions through the bottom of the screen, so.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#13

All right. Thank you all for your presentations. I wanted to let you all know that in addition to the executives that we have on the stage today, we have a few other members of the executive community that may help us out. Geri Gold is over here. She runs our HPE FS business. Neo McDonald's and compute has an important wedding anniversary today. So representing Compute is Krista Satterthwaite, who is our Compute SVP and General Manager. We have some mics floating around. So if you would like to -- Yes. Okay. You guys know the drill. Super. Let's go with Wamsi first right here in the -- Yes. Okay. And then.

Wamsi Mohan

analyst
#14

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America. I guess I want to kick off around the assumption of compute because you kind of broke the compute TAM into non-AI and the AI opportunity for inferencing. You're seeing a lot of your competitors talk about AI servers for within sort of the standard category for training as well. So kind of wondering why you're not categorizing any of those kind of servers within for training specifically within compute. And do you see the entire AI opportunity necessarily in the HPC AI TAM only?

Antonio Neri

executive
#15

So first of all, we don't see the AI opportunities on HPEC and AI. That's why Jeremy made a comment in his remarks, you have to think about the server category, okay? The server category in our company has two distinct segments, the compute segment, which is the traditional enterprise and what I call the cloud-centric kind of infrastructure, whether it's Tier 1, 2 or 3. We see that also in other verticals like telecommunications and obviously, more at the edge as well. And then you have what I call the HPEC and supercomputing side which includes the traditional HPEC business, the supercomputer now we -- Justin talked about AI infrastructure. Much of the AI infrastructure for training tuning is captured in his side, but there are aspects of training that may be capturing compute as well. But most of the influence in the end is in the traditional compute because you may deploy a small cluster or you may deploy 1 server with 8 GPUs. And that's why Jeremy was very good in saying when you think about the entire server category as a whole, we expect that business to grow mid-single digits approximately $60 billion. I think you quoted. But the important message you need to take away is that for AI, we cover the entire life cycle. And in particular, on the training tuning because we have a large set of capabilities across supercomputing as one aspect. AI infrastructure, which is going to grow 7x supercomputer and then the AI software platform, which is a huge differentiation to be able to deploy this system at scale. The fact of the matter is that we're going to give you an order for what we call APUs which includes GPUs and other accelerators which includes both compute and HPEC and AI.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#16

I want to go with Aaron in the front here.

Aaron Rakers

analyst
#17

So first of all, I just want a clarification. The $3 billion number that you talked about for the AI, I think it was new orders. There was numbers in the past you've turned around pipeline and orders at $1.6 billion, I think it started at $800 million. I just want to clarify what's the comp of that number previously? And then on the AI narrative, I'm going to get a little bit technical here, but the slingshot is a core competency of the company. So I'm curious of where we stand. As we think about these large AI models, infrastructure deployments, there's a lot of inertia around InfiniBand versus Ethernet enters this migration from 400 to 800 gig. I'm curious to where you stand on Slingshot from a technology perspective to keep up with that market.

Antonio Neri

executive
#18

So maybe, Jeremy, do you want to talk about the orders and then you can talk about the slingshot.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#19

Sure. So we have talked historically about wins, AI wins at $1.6 billion. We've also talked about how that contributed to our order book in HPC and AI that was around $3 billion at the end of Q3. I think the better compare of what we're saying now is these are -- this is representative of what we have orders booked in the year. So that obviously will feed into the order book, but that is -- there may be other factors that feed into that order book. So these are our GPU-based orders that are booked within the year, and that's over $3 billion, and we see a path for that to continue to grow. I would say also on top of that, that the $1.6 billion was more capturing what we were seeing in the near-term demand around the H-100 NVIDIA piece, I would say that a meaningful majority of the over $3 billion order number is made up of that category.

Antonio Neri

executive
#20

So think about it as it is, 3 billion orders, which are in our books, and we will take time to build, ship all the time. And that's what we were very clear in our commenter that we want to give you the order, right, because sometimes between the wind and the order, there is a time delay. You win it, but then you have to book it, it takes time and all that. So $3 billion is the order for the balance of the year so far.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#21

Year-to-date.

Justin Hotard

executive
#22

Year-to-date. Okay. Slingshot. So I think, first of all, we get caught up a little bit in mixing interconnects, network interconnects that are used for east-west traffic and within a cluster versus 400, 800 gig at a data center switching side. So if you think about interconnects and a cluster, there's 2 players in the market today, InfiniBand from NVIDIA and Slingshot. Those are the 2 things providing high-performance interconnect for east-west traffic and clusters. If you think a little bit about what Wamsi was asking earlier on a box, there's not a lot of people buying 1 box of GPUs today, right? They're buying them in 512 GPU building blocks. And so that whole thing has to be connected by a network, right? They're -- and that network is InfiniBand as the default for the NVIDIA reference architecture, the H100 reference architecture. However, we have demand outside of that in our supercomputing business for Slingshot for interconnecting both H100s, but also Grace Hopper as well as MI300. And so we're -- and we obviously are running that on the Frontier supercomputer and Argonne supercomputer, which is powered by Intel GPUs. So we've got broad demand for that interconnect. That's different than the data center network that sits on top. And if you think about why that's different is that at the data center level, I've got to handle a whole bunch of different kinds of traffic. And so the speed matters because I got to manage the inefficiency. The interconnect is all about tuning and optimization for latency and loss because I've got to run on parallel workload. I'm trying to run 1 large training run in the supercomputing world and running 1 large simulation for weather prediction or something like that, and that's why they're very different. To give you a technical metric, we did a little bit of analysis on Slingshot, a couple -- maybe a year or 2 ago. And we found that Slingshot at 200 gig was 92% effective when running Rocky, RDMA over converged Ethernet, for those of you that enjoy the technical side of this versus 50% for Ethernet. So that means that packets data efficiency was far higher because we're running 1 very specific workload. We're trying to address GPUs or CPUs across distributed memory. That's why east-west traffic and the interconnect for the clusters is different than the top network. Does that -- I know I went deep on the tax. So I want to make sure.

Antonio Neri

executive
#23

And the other thing, I would say, part of the investments we are making, right? So we talk about investing in the supercomputer and IP. Obviously, that supercomputer and IP, a lot is the, what he talked about, which is the networking piece, which is Link shot and the software to manage the latency. That will follow 400 and 800 , right? But that's because of the Internet. But the architecture is so different, right? Because you're connecting every node to every node. And if you have a Frontier is 9408 nodes x 9,408 nodes because you have to look as a 1 entity. And that's where our advantage is. And that's why we can use it elsewhere.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#24

Okay. Why don't we go to Tony right next to you and we'll come right down the line. And I'll just -- could I just remind you to introduce yourself on the mic, please.

Toni Sacconaghi

analyst
#25

Tony Sacconaghi from Bernstein. Sorry, I just want to follow up on that last question. So you're saying you have $3 billion in orders year-to-date for accelerated compute. It sounds like the vast majority of that is HPC and AI. You said your HPC and AI backlog is $3 billion. It's been $2 billion or more every quarter for the last 12 quarters. So is the $3 billion in orders like truly incremental? Like how do we think about that? And I don't think you addressed the specific question, what was that exact comparable metric last year through this date because I'm still struggling to jive the huge order number with the backlog that you're attributing to AI? And then secondly, just related to that, can you comment on the wait times for delivery on your AI servers, how concentrated your customer base? And what kinds of customers have generated the orders?

Antonio Neri

executive
#26

Yes. Maybe we'll start with the first one and then back to you because the second is interesting and it ties to the customer stories.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#27

Right. When we thought about this metric, Tony, we wanted to make sure we were being thoughtful not about just the near-term demand like in the H100 which again was more of the focus of our prior discussion of the $1.6 billion wins. We wanted to capture the full life cycle. And you can see that, again, within the lower inferencing area, within the compute area, all the way up through the supercomputing space. And then obviously, within the high-performance space where you're seeing the H-100 activity happen more. And so the prior period compared to that, I would say you can think about the compute portion of that has not significantly increased on a year-over-year basis, less than 10% of that total order base. Supercomputing at this point, a little bit more than that, but not -- again, not a significantly high percentage. So the vast majority right now is falling in that HPC area that's attaching with the H100s. And this is the metric that we're going to continue to provide to you guys. I appreciate that some of the order book dynamics. That had a multiyear component to it. As you know, some of these supercomputing deals take multi-years to resolve. So we thought this order metric would be a better way for you guys to digest the activity that's currently happening.

Antonio Neri

executive
#28

And in the prior period, Tony, there's also the fact that you may have like a Frontier or Aurora or some of those that just wipes up quite significant backlog in one go and then you build again. But this is what he's referring that 2023, the mix of the bookings is -- has changed quite dramatically. Okay. So you want to talk about the customers. What type of customers demand we're seeing?

Justin Hotard

executive
#29

Yes. So I touched on some of the segments. And I would say the way to think about it is, if you think about some of those cloud service providers, they tend to be buying in these 512 GPU chunks that I touched on earlier. So in terms of concentration, I would think of them kind of buying large clusters in that stage for training. Now they may buy multiples, but that's a good building block to think about. Then the foundation model builders that are buying directly, I would say, again, that's probably the largest size they're building. So I think they may be buying something that's half or a full pot of GPUs, I think 256 or 512. And then we have customers that are buying subsets of that. And so I think about -- and I think of those more like traditional enterprise customers, existing HPC and AI customers that are adding capabilities. What we haven't seen yet is material demand from national AI initiatives and national AI centers. And I think we'll start to see some of that come in. That may look like more of a mix of our traditional supercomputing systems. So they may buy Cray EX systems, they may buy Cray XDs or they may buy a combination. An example of that would be if you look at the win we announced with [indiscernible], they bought a small Grace Hopper cluster, which is basically for AI training. The reason that's so important and so differentiated is that there's a lot of customers that are looking at Gen AI not just for broad LLM applications. And I touched on this with Argon. There are customers looking at training scientific models, doing expert models with deep technical knowledge, those customers realize that they may need something that's a little different than just the standard building block today, and that's why they're coming to us. And I think you'll hopefully, you'll see us announce some more news on that shortly. But there's -- we see these -- each of these markets is very different today.

Antonio Neri

executive
#30

And you have to think about different models, right? A lot of the momentum we have heard in the market is about this large language model. That's 1 way to think about it. But the other ones are traditional AI models like computer vision, mod simulation, molecular docking, climate, climate is pretty significant as well. And the future text picture to tax. We have all this. And 1 of the things we have, which is a key differentiator, we have been supporting those models for a long time. Now they'll become more pervasive.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#31

Simon?

Simon Leopold

analyst
#32

Simon Leopold with Raymond James. Two if I may. First one, I want to see if we could get a better understanding of the impact on the financial statements of rising and high interest rates how that factors into the business? And the second one is probably for Phil is what are your market assumptions when you talk about slight growth in the Edge business? What are you assuming is going on in the world around HP and what's your basically assumption on your share position?

Antonio Neri

executive
#33

So you want to talk about the investor general.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#34

Yes. I would think about that, Simon, in 2 parts. As you likely know, the large majority of our company debt is attributable to our FS business. And there, that business is effectively able to capture the high interest rates and pass that on through to customers as it's attracting on the margin there. And so that business is actually driving higher revenue performance in the HPEFS business that I mentioned earlier as a result of that direction. On the core business, we mentioned a $0.10 headwind to EPS. That is definitely a component of that headwind are the higher interest rates as we're rolling over bonds, and we're having to incur higher interest rates on those bonds as we roll.

Antonio Neri

executive
#35

And then on the market share assumptions that we are making. So we're assuming that the market is negative for next year, so the market drops next year, and we offset that through continued market share gains, which we have been gaining market share in the last couple of years and then also the expansion of the TAM into the new areas like I talked about in my presentation, namely security, data internet networks, private 5G and now -- so that's the assumption that we are making.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#36

Asiya. Right in front.

Asiya Merchant

analyst
#37

Asiya from Citi Research. Just if I can, on the storage, which I understand now is the hybrid cloud segment. I think the underlying assumption would be as you shift more to Electro to your own software IP, the margins on that would be higher than the mid-teens that you've been reporting. I think in the revised model, that's kind of what you're reiterating that the hybrid segment would still be in the mid-teens. So maybe you can walk us through, are there some underlying investments still that are going on in storage. And then you talked about market share gains as well, specifically as it relates to storage. Maybe you can kind of lay out where you see strong opportunity to gain share there? And who would be the traditional players? Is it the legacy players that you're going after? Is there some of the more newer software offerings there?

Fidelma Russo

executive
#38

Okay. So in terms of storage investment, we've invested a lot over the last number of years in the new architecture, we continue to invest on the protocol build-out on the architecture. So we're really poised in the block space to take share and our investment in the go-to-market side of it is now complementing the engineering investment we've put in. So there is continued investment in new protocols and also the investment in the go-to-market side. In terms of taking share, we've got about a 10% market share within storage. We've got a lot of runway to go, and we're very confident about the cloud-enabled and the platform-based attractiveness of the architecture with our customers. And we see us not just against traditional players. But also, against when customers are thinking about should I put my data in the public cloud? Or should I put my data on-prem? And so especially as AI is more top of mind on storage buyers as well, we are seeing more and more conversations about how do I expand my storage footprint on-prem.

Antonio Neri

executive
#39

And part of that investment that Fidelma talked about protocol is the file piece of this because it ties directly to the IPs.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#40

Can we go over to Meta over here on the side and the front.

Meta Marshall

analyst
#41

Meta Marshall, Morgan Stanley. No numerous if you guys talked about kind of customers exploring different paths on AI. I guess I just wanted to get a sense of where do you think customers are on that journey? I mean, then trying to kind of discover what their approach is going to be? And when do you seize the time line of some of those decisions? And then maybe second question. You guys talked about a double-digit operating margin on HPC. Just what are kind of the critical components to getting from where you are today to that double digit?

Antonio Neri

executive
#42

Do you want to take those two?

Justin Hotard

executive
#43

Yes. Okay. I mean I'll answer the double-digit one. It's pretty first. Operating margin is really simple. It's scale in the business, which gives us leverage and then it's just -- it's the mix shift to more of our IP-rich offerings. And that includes the penetration of our software stack. Obviously, continued penetration of Slingshot as a part of that the growth and demand we see. And then the complete solution we talked about where we're integrating our services and our supercomputing IP and that software stack in HP GreenLake for LLM. So that's the driver of margins. On your first question on the journey, look, I think where we are right now is here are a number of customers spending -- making massive investments around foundation models. A lot of it is around LLMs for broad commercial applications. And that is not broadly deployed into massive investments in the enterprise yet. It's largely -- I think it's large at the early days. We think the enterprise build-out is going to be massive. We also think that the initial models, which are largely general purpose language models across many languages around the world are going to be the beginning of a much broader and more robust build-out of models and training and that will be things like technical use cases. So you think about scientific models, you think about, obviously, financial and trading is 1 that we'll probably continue to build just given the dynamics and the economics but that will go on and on and on. And I think that's what -- that's why we think we're at the beginning of something very big. It's also why we're being very conservative in terms of how we're thinking about the business and our forecasting because we're really looking at the demand that we see today. But we think this is going to be the beginning of a long investment. And enterprises -- most enterprises I talk to, and Krista can comment as well are very productivity-focused today. As I touched on, I think productivity is the start. Over time, I think we're going to see people look at new revenue models, and we'll see that part of the business emerge as well.

Antonio Neri

executive
#44

Yes. That's why I want to make the comment that A lot of the new customers are about developing these foundation models. Most of the enterprises are going to leverage these foundation models in tune those models with their own data. but they are right now more focused on productivity like we are in our own company, right? How we leverage that, whether it's in the coding base, with our R&D team, whether it's in our operations, in our services team with bots and the like. But I think the biggest focus for them is how they maintain control of the intellectual property in the data in a way that allows them to deploy these models with confidence and the accuracy because that's the other important thing you talk has to be accurate, right?

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#45

Okay. Why don't we go with David over here. 2 more over here live streamed then we'll come back up to the front you folks.

David Vogt

analyst
#46

Great. David Vogt from UBS. Two, if I may, 1 for Justin, 1 for Phil. As inferencing becomes a bigger part of the AI sort of story going forward, how is Slingshot sort of competitively positioned against the legacy sort of Ethernet vendors as we move in that direction. And then for Phil, you talked about 4 different categories sort of driving growth in Edge and Aruba. You talked about networking convergence with security, also data center switching. Those are 2 pretty crowded markets. So can you maybe touch on what you bring to the table besides sort of the operating system, which you touched on briefly in terms of how you're positioning yourself vis-a-vis the competitors in the marketplace already kind of pursuing a similar strategy?

Justin Hotard

executive
#47

Yes. So I think if you look at it, again, as you think about Slingshot, think of it as east-west traffic within a cluster. So as inferencing workloads scale and there's more demand, there probably are parts of inferencing that will have large capacity, right? I mean think about content distribution networks as a parallel in the internet. If you think about the other part of inferencing, which is why we're focused on the entire life cycle getting down to the edge, these are -- this could be down into your mobile device or into obviously, a car as we see with autonomous driving. So there'll be a lot of places that inferencing gets used. I mean we do think there's going to be a demand for cloud service or a large cluster of inferencing solutions as part of the broader market buildout. Phil, I'll let you answer the other one.

Philip Mottram

executive
#48

Yes. So I think your question was crowded markets in both campus switching and security. And then how do we believe that we'll be successful in those parts of the market. So on the campus switching element, I mean, our strategy there is to follow the network. So obviously, the access point connects into the campus network, and we find customers that use the platform Aruba Central. Once they're comfortable with that, it's a logical extension to go into campus switching. And we find it -- there's a big player, obviously, in campus switching space that we come up against quite regularly and customers like our customers entity and the fact that we have 1 platform linking all of the products together whereas some parking peers have different platforms for different products. So that's on the campus switching side of it. On the security side of it is -- I think that's a market that's going to go through a number of changes. Isn't it? Because on the security side, you've got the 3 elements being ZTNA, SWG and CASB. And most enterprise customers right now don't buy those 3 from 1 player. They're often buying them from 3 different players. And then on the network side, you've got a network firewall and the SD-WAN side of it. So I agree that there's a lot of players in the market, but there aren't many players with the full range of 5 capabilities. So I actually think we've got a really, really good opportunity there, albeit the market is going to have to go through a number of steps to consolidate.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#49

Sidney, please. Yes?

Sidney Ho

analyst
#50

Great. Sidney Ho with Deutsche Bank. Just want to follow up with that question. You talked about Intelligent Edge growing about low double digits over a 3-year period. which of these opportunities that you highlighted are more near term, call it, 1 to 2 years versus longer term? Do you have all the product and services already in your portfolio? And in the near term, are you expecting the operating margin of that business to go back to that mid-20% already in fiscal '24?

Philip Mottram

executive
#51

I mean just on the capability side of it in the product, I mean, on the data center side of it, we have been investing in the products in that space for the last 12 months, and we've got a pretty good defined road map for the next couple of years, and we do low hundreds of millions already in the data center space. And it's kind of difficult actually for us to custom-wise switches, we don't always know whether they're going into a data center or a campus location. But for the most part, we know that some of the products are already going into data centers. So we've got a good starting point there and the sales teams are pretty accustomed to selling in data center. So data center is a very real opportunity for us today, and we've got good growth there, and we've been adding more resources so I feel pretty good about that. Private 5G is an earlier space. I mean the company that we acquired is pretty low in revenue terms but there is a lot of interest because what private 5G is allowing companies to do is companies with very outdoor locations, like I don't know, oil refineries and those sorts of places, they haven't really been able to benefit from network technology before because they struggled with covering large outdoor spaces and private 5G enables that. So we've seen since we made the acquisition, a lot of interest from many, many different vertical sectors, albeit the starting point from a revenue perspective is relatively low. And the same is true on security. The company that we bought, we're very, very pleased with the technology and the people. And when customers go through proof of concepts of the technology, every proof of concept that we have had with the customers since we bought the company, they've always proceeded to contracts. So we're very happy with the technology. But again, it's relatively low revenues at this point. So we've got a way to scale. And then with regard to the margins and OP, I mean on the security side, they would be better than the margins that we currently see. On the private 5G would they be there or thereabouts, maybe slightly below. Data center would be typical to the margins that we, again, would currently see, and then on the OpEx side of it. This market, we should benefit on the top line, potentially things get more aggressive next year because the market contracts and therefore, potentially have to do a bit more discounting discuss. I mean we feel like we've got a pretty strong proposition. But then when you go to the OpEx line, during the supply chain crisis, we had to fly everything around the world by air, which is more expensive. We just have to pay expedite fees to suppliers to get equipment moving. And as the supply chain is now opened, we now the opportunity to move equipment around by ship and not pay expedite fees. So there's puts and takes in the overall P&L, but I think the statements that Jeremy made earlier are very doable.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#52

I would just add to that, I would say, yes, it's a dynamic of -- similar to compute, we had high-priced backlog that was as it was being worked down with lower logistic costs, we saw above-trend results. And so that's going to start to normalize a bit, and we're continuing to make investment in this business. And so while I expect us to be in FY '24, maybe on the higher end of that mid-20s range, over the 3-year outlook, we would expect to be in that period -- in that range.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#53

Why don't we take one from the webcast. It's been staring at us.

Antonio Neri

executive
#54

Yes, there is one here, right? Do you want to read it?

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#55

I'll paraphrase it. Actually, I can read it as well. So it's $200 million in H3C cash flow you mentioned, for fiscal '23. How does that compare to prior years? And is that a full year number?

Jeremy Cox

executive
#56

Sure. So maybe a bit of the confusion here is that we have to differentiate between the earnings that are incorporated for EPS purposes and then the cash that we ultimately include in our free cash flow, which are really from dividends, which are paid in arrears. And so that may be the disconnect for the person that asked this. And so the adjustment we've made to the $200 million on a year-over-year basis is reflecting the cash received in the dividends. The adjustment we made to EPS was reflected to our amount of earnings that benefited from the addition of those H3C earnings into our non-GAAP EPS.

Antonio Neri

executive
#57

But it has been fully...

Jeremy Cox

executive
#58

Yes. Over time, it would match. We do have some dynamics with the disposition where under rules in China, there are certain dividends -- our dividends aren't allowed to be paid after a certain period of time. And so that will be an impact in '24 as well.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#59

And is that number essentially flattish? Has it been growing? How can they look back a year or 2?

Jeremy Cox

executive
#60

I think that's the relative adjustment for '23.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#61

Okay. All right. Why don't we go with Samik up here in the front. Thanks, Kate.

Samik Chatterjee

analyst
#62

Samik from JPMorgan. I had 1 for Justin and 1 for Jeremy. Justin, when you look at the different parts of the AI side that you're offering software, networking and then the compute solutions, like how are you thinking about the go-to-market in terms of do you want to sort of remain the full solution provider? Or is it better sort of adoption and quicker adoption to be chased if you disaggregate that pieces and sort of use your differentiation in each. And for Jeremy, you talked about H3C proceeds, you'll update the investors on that. When you think about excess cash, can you just define that for us? How do you think about what sort of cash on the balance sheet that you need? And what are your priorities once you get that cash in excess of what you want to -- what are the priorities?

Justin Hotard

executive
#63

I think the way to think about this simply is in supercomputing, we're a full provider, and that's necessary because it's almost impossible to deliver a supercomputer without delivering the whole system. It's really, really challenging. Probably there's people that tried it, but it's hard. In the AI infrastructure space, we're selling -- we obviously aspire to be a full provider in that space, but we're also selling parts of our stack where it makes sense. So in some cases, we're obviously selling H100 clusters. I mentioned Recursion Pharmaceuticals. They're a software customer only today. They bought our machine learning development environment. And then you've got a customer like Alfalfa that initially bought infrastructure from us, then bought software and is now our launch customer for HP GreenLake for large language models.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#64

So on the cash flow side from H3C, look, I think we're constantly balancing between our desire to return more capital to our shareholders. but also making sure we have the right amount of capital to make the strategic investments to grow our business. And so we assess that balance through our ROI-based framework that we talked about. I think as the H3C proceeds come in, we have now directionally suggested to you guys that, "Hey, we have a better confidence in our long-term outlook on free cash flow. That's driving our expectation of increasing the amount of share repurchase and dividends. as a total percentage of cash flow back to our shareholders to the 65% to 75% range. And so I think those things will be factored in when we get to the cash position when H3C is delivered in kind of the mid calendar '24 period.

Antonio Neri

executive
#65

So again, I think it's important that when you step back and look at what we guided for capital return in '24 and the direction for the next 3 years. It's all the operational side, right? So we have better line of sight. The pivot is happening. Obviously, we have seen the gross margin increase in our portfolio, and that gave us the confidence to increase from the 50% to 60% or now 65% to 75%. And in that increased the dividend by 8% at the time when the dividend comes to be paid. And ultimately, when we receive the proceeds sometime in '24, we're going to use the same capital framework. But the confidence has -- is not a $3 billion -- $3.5 billion after tax rate, it will be less, obviously, but it's about our ability to execute the plan that we just gave. And then when the cash comes in, we will assess the best return, but we don't expect to hold excess cash in our balance sheet.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#66

I want to go with Mike, and then we'll go with Luke.

Michael Ng

analyst
#67

Mike Ng from Goldman Sachs. I just have 2. The first 1 is just on Intelligent Edge. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about the curve over this midterm outlook, obviously, very front-end weighted. Is that just a function of some of the backlog reduction that we'll see over the next 2 years? I'm just trying to reconcile that with some of the growth initiatives that you have that we mentioned before? And why doesn't that help to accelerate that growth in fiscal '21 and fiscal '26? And then just a quick follow-up on EFC.

Philip Mottram

executive
#68

Yes. So I mean, you're exactly right. I mean, obviously, this year, we have benefited by a significant backlog retirement, and we have some of that next year, albeit at a lower rate. but we do benefit from this portfolio expansion. And as I say, next year, we're lapping very significant growth, obviously, for this year. So probably next year is going to be more subdued, as Jeremy highlighted. But then as you go out year 2, year 3 after that, we would expect to build way more momentum in the new areas that I highlighted today. data centers, security and private 5G. And I think some of those could be quite meaningful in the sort of medium term.

Antonio Neri

executive
#69

Yes. But I think it's important that I miss a point. In the last 2 years, we added $2 billion to this business. That doesn't go away, okay? Let's be clear. We added $2 billion. We are building a new platform, if you will, and we're going to grow from that new baseline, the numbers that Jeremy explained. In that, there is obviously continued market share in the campus and branch, which includes wireless and switching and wider network, security will be a driver of that, obviously, with SD-WAN. But then there are the new areas that takes longer to mature because you need to either fully integrate in the platform, customer use cases will come to life, go-to-market is ramping. So that's why we gave you the guidance that we gave. But let's not walk back on the fact that we just added $2 billion in that space as the new baseline.

Michael Ng

analyst
#70

Great. That's very clear. And then my next question is just around some of the comments around compute ASPs benefiting from accelerated servers in fiscal '24. I guess, how meaningful of a benefit is that? Are you seeing demand for accelerated servers right now? And then if you could provide some additional comments around the GPU availability point, that would be very helpful.

Antonio Neri

executive
#71

Yes. I mean -- so the AUPs or average unit price, when you have some sort of as of the rate on particular GPU is significantly higher, the traditional CPU. The question is the margin side on the house, right? So that's why our constant approach with the operations team, Mark Rands and Krista here representing computer on pricing discipline is very, very critical. So as the shift continues to happen. And as I said, we see evidence of that, but it's still very small relative to the size of the CPU based in traditional compute, call it a single server. The structural side of that will grow. And also remember, with Gen 11, we also have another structural change, which obviously we can add more memory, more storage and more everything associated with that. And also, there is a component of subscription as a part of GreenLake to life cycle that server. That's why we said on an aggregate, the average unit price in '24, plus the rise of cost on the traditional components, which is just a function of demand and supply after the capacity kind of shortages is going to happen. So the question is how that transition happen is what we built in our guidance is what we have line of sight but in the context of the full life cycle.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#72

I would maybe just add 1 point to that. On a year-over-year basis, though, we'll still see some pressure in AUPs why we're seeing some of these tailwinds in Antonio described, we're coming off a significantly inflated AUP position in FY '23. So Part of the compute story will be some of that compression in AUP even though we'll see tailwinds start carrying that out of FY '24.

Antonio Neri

executive
#73

In the second half.

Justin Hotard

executive
#74

Just on lead time, I mean, I think what I would say is, I think Tony asked us maybe not have answered it earlier, is we continue to see demand well in excess of supply, right? And we don't see that changing right now. So that continues to be the view we have going into '24. I think that's why Jeremy touched on it being governed by availability.

Antonio Neri

executive
#75

And our mix of demand is -- can be quite significant, right? So if you have a supercomputing with 40,000 GPUs. That's versus a customer as to us, right?

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#76

Lou?

Louis Miscioscia

analyst
#77

Louis Miscioscia with Daiwa Capital Markets. So asking a little bit of a different question. ARM recently went public, and you've got companies like NVIDIA, Apple, AWS using their chip. Just wondering, is there any opportunity for HP to include any ARM products that could lower your cost? Or alternatively, do you see it as a possibility any risk to any area?

Antonio Neri

executive
#78

To include ARM?

Louis Miscioscia

analyst
#79

ARM products, yes.

Antonio Neri

executive
#80

We already do. It's -- well, we already have a great partnership with a company called Ampere. We already integrated that in the general man platforms. We already have interest from customers that have unique workloads. They actually were not typical AI workloads, were all the type of workloads, maybe the core count and the power and all of that was perfectly suited for that workload, but it's still early. And remember that part of the challenge, I will say, but I think as an opportunity, is the entire ecosystem of the application, compilers and software have to come altogether. I think we are at a different mature level than we were maybe 3 to 4 years ago. But we already have in the supercomputer. I mean you can talk about that.

Justin Hotard

executive
#81

Yes. I would add 2 things. I mean we were the -- when NVIDIA announced Grace Hopper, they announced the win that we had with them with CSCS in Switzerland or Grace Hopper, and so there's a solution with the Cray EX and the supercomputing side, that is ARM based. The other thing is in May, we announced a system at the University of Bristol in the U.K. It is a great, great Super Chip system, which is ARM-based. So as Antonio said, it's very much about the tool chain, but we're across whether it's the compute portfolio or in HPC and AI, we see demand, we're supporting the demand strategically and working closely with partners like Ampere and video.

Antonio Neri

executive
#82

But we have that capability already in our products to support.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#83

I think we have one sort of back center. Yes, please.

Sid Nag

analyst
#84

Sid Nag from Gartner Research. I had a quick question in terms of your longer-term strategy. It seems like your [indiscernible] in the corporation. So on one hand, you're competing with the incumbents and you're competing with hyperscalers, right? So in other words, do you look at the hyperscaler space as a co-op and compete strategy and continue to compete with the incumbents? And where do you see the growth coming?

Antonio Neri

executive
#85

I mean we talk about the [indiscernible] hybrid and in that experience you have to include the public aspect of that experience. And hence, why GreenLake as a platform, as our cloud platform, which is truly designed with either principle, we actually support the 3 largest cloud because customers have data workloads in those public cloud. And our goal is to give them the best cloud native experience, whether on the public cloud or on-prem. And at Discover, we made several announcements with Amazon Web Services. We had a partnership with Azure for different things and so forth. So we have to continue to include that in our thinking. And in other aspects, we are going to compete, right, when it comes down to deliver specific outcomes by delivering an on-prem or a colo or edge infrastructure that have the same principles. But ultimately, give to them an edge to cloud, hybrid experience that matters. I think the growth, I mean, private cloud, as I said, right, is growing at 10%. That's a great opportunity for us honestly. That's why we entered the market with a series of offerings that I think are better suited for what the customers are looking for with choice because we support all the run times available in the market. So it's just a balance, right? But ultimately, is what the customer is looking for and how we address those needs in the best possible way. If [indiscernible] selling services through a hybrid solution, through data protection services that may they back up in a public cloud. That's fine. It can be either. But ultimately, we are driving to a cloud native experience that delivers the best economics with the best experience that's truly hybrid. Did I see a couple over here. No, I guess not. We got 1 here.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#86

Yes, we go to the web first. And the question is, you noted $0.18 in investments in 2024? Are these products or go-to-market investment, which businesses?

Antonio Neri

executive
#87

Yes, it's a combination of both. So obviously, in Phil's business, right, we continue to make investments in the product side. Phil talked about the continued progression of our data center products, right, with our Aruba or SCX, which gives the same experience if you're in the data center or the campus and branch, but obviously a different feature functionality, but it's all managed through the same platform. Also, it has integration that is doing with 5G and access security, but also is investing as well in the go-to-market, continue to expand our coverage and specialization. All our investment in go-to-market are about specialization, much deeper specialization security in hybrid cloud, obviously, growing the coverage of -- Phil talked about the storage in HPC and AI solution architecting is important, presales is important. And then on the R&D side, obviously, there is a sizable investment that we are driving in AI is silicon. When you are in the silicon, you asked the question right, it takes multiyear investment in silicon. It is not like a quarter and done, right? So it takes a continuous investment and the software because the software we are developing is the machine learning development environment. It's what we call the past layer to make sure the data automation and data pipeline or AI takes place because 1 of the biggest pain points customers have is that how to bring together the data to be trained on that model, right? And so those are the things we are investing as well. So there is a combination, but is ultimately, it's edge, hybrid cloud and AI and obviously, Fidelma has other investment in GreenLake as well. But also, we've made some investment in compute. Silicon root of trust and other software elements are very important, which we can monetize to our subscription-based models.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#88

All right. We've got a follow-up from Wamsi. And we have time for 1 or 2 more. We'll get you back, for sure.

Wamsi Mohan

analyst
#89

I was wondering if you could share any color on the $3 billion APU orders in terms of just average and median order size. So we can understand if that's -- how much of that is largely HPC-driven? I mean are these kind of order sizes of $100 million each? Or are we talking about $250,000? What's it kind of distribution look like?

Antonio Neri

executive
#90

I mean, it's obviously a large-sized deals.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#91

More sizable.

Antonio Neri

executive
#92

More sizable.

Justin Hotard

executive
#93

Yes. I think I covered the -- I think Tony asked the question about the customer profile. I think you could sort of think about the mix in that construct, the types of customers. And obviously, the large -- the more super pod size 512 GPU size clusters people are buying, the more disproportionate they shape that mix.

Antonio Neri

executive
#94

Yes. But I think about high grade number. Yes. We've got yes, we've got here. That's side We haven't made on that side.

Matthew Sheerin

analyst
#95

Matt Sheerin from Stifel. A question on your guidance for fiscal '24. You talked about a $0.42 tailwind in terms of operational improvements and is going to offset some of those headwinds you talked about. Could you go into that? That's a pretty big number? Are we talking about restructuring? Will there be charges, headcount reductions, things like that.

Antonio Neri

executive
#96

Yes. Well, we have -- it's almost like the same number we had last year, if I remember correctly. It was a $0.45, I think, last year or $0.40 plus in operational improvement. But it's actually the combination of the mix shift, right, which is driving higher gross margin dollars as the mix of the business continues to shift. Also, there is ongoing improvements in our operations effectiveness, which obviously, we drive as a part of ongoing improvement. We do that all now within our domain. We built those investments in our typical plans. Now the typical way that was done many years ago. And so also, we continue to be way more efficient from the back-end operations with our COO, but we have done a great job in driving efficiency in our real estate, in our supply chain with digitization and all the things you expect. But I think the vast majority of this is the continued mix shift in our portfolio that drives higher gross profit. And also, the go-to-market. The go-to-market is pretty interesting evolution, right? Because since I became CEO, I have taken deliberate action with our Chief Sales Officer to simplify the structure, eliminate roles, drive simplicity in our sales compensation, more focus productivity at the sales rep level. Those are all bundled together in that $0.42.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#97

Okay. Sure. We've got Aaron in front.

Aaron Rakers

analyst
#98

Aaron Rakers, again, Wells Fargo. I just want to keep going back to this AI stuff, so I apologize. I think in the past in the commentary, you've talked about a lot of that being under the GreenLake umbrella. And so as we all try and think about this path and the pace of monetization of this large order book, how do we think about that in the context of GreenLake, right? Wouldn't it come out and actually rev rec over a period of time under the contractual GreenLake model? And do you take the capital intensity related to that as well? Do you take the upfront CapEx?

Jeremy Cox

executive
#99

So through the GreenLake model, we have the benefit of our HPFS business that ultimately incurs that leverage cost at the end of the day. And that provides the capacity for us to grow that portion of the business. From a revenue recognition perspective, it depends at the end of the day on the term length in the contract with the customer. The shorter-term periods, you would expect to see while we recognize revenue upfront in the segment, we would be eliminating that and recognizing it over time for the company, whereas you have longer-term arrangements with the customer, those would require upfront recognition, both for the segment and for the company. So -- but overall, in to your broader question of how much of that GreenLake business was within that $3 billion plus base, there's a fair amount. At this point, I would say the majority is CapEx -- transactional CapEx, but there's a good chunk of that GreenLake business embedded in that number.

Antonio Neri

executive
#100

Yes. We are extremely aware around of the capital intensity. So we're driving different commercial terms in the way they pay us so that we can ensure that there is ongoing sometimes prepayments of that, okay? But ultimately, as I think about the type of customers, right? So I think you're going to have a mix of different type of transactions in GreenLake, you're going to have those who say, Antonio, Justin, I need a virtual product cloud with this size for me for the next 3 years because I'm going to continue to build the model training, retraining, and it's not a multi-tenant solution. It is in a public instance that leverages our data center services and power efficiency and expertise that we have to run the system of scale, but they are dedicated to them, right? So that, I think, is going to be quite the vast majority of it. And then there will be those enterprises that may want to tune their data for a period of time -- tune their model for a period of time that may need for a month or 2, and then they said, "Okay, I don't need that anymore." But it's still from the data intellectual property perspective, they want to make sure that's contained, right? They don't want to put data in a multi-tenant type of environment. That's very obvious.

Justin Hotard

executive
#101

I mean maybe just 2 things, given the demand that we've been talking about, most customers when they're coming to us even to buy a cluster on HP GreenLake, it's more about getting the operating expertise and getting it up and running faster. They want control of the cluster, right? They're not -- they're not interested in using it for a period of time. They actually -- they're willing to commit because of the limited supply. The second thing, and Antonio touched on this, is the multi-tenancy and this is different than the public cloud. And I touched on this a little bit in my comments, but public cloud, you're running multiple applications on 1 server, right, in most cases or you maybe scale it out to a few servers. It's kind of like what we do on our iPhones or laptops. In a multi-tenant environment in HPC and in AI, it's exactly the same. You're allocating a large portion, if not the entire cluster to 1 job. And the application is running in parallel over the whole thing. And that actually is where we have a lot of experience because we built system management software that does this for supercomputing customers. And it's exactly that it's very parallel to what we do in that space. It's almost exactly the same. And so as Antonio touched on, as the market matures and we see demand for that tuning workload, we think that's going to be another opportunity. We haven't -- we have the core technology for it, but we haven't seen that demand emerge yet.

Jeffrey Kvaal

executive
#102

Okay. We have time for 1 more? All right. We've got 1 right up front. Samik, please.

Samik Chatterjee

analyst
#103

Samik, JPMorgan. Justin, going back to AI again. Liquid cooling, a lot of discussion nowadays on that. How do you see that as a differentiator related to where the competitors are on that front, but it also seems like that ecosystem to provide liquid cooling is not really completely developed yet. You think about partnerships or even M&A, are you looking to enable what are you doing to enable that ecosystem so that you can sort of build on that differentiation.

Justin Hotard

executive
#104

Yes. There's multiple elements to the ecosystem. This is a place. Cray has a history of working in liquid cooling for decades. So we've actually got lots of experience in implementing it. When you think about the liquid cooling ecosystem, you need to think about it across a set of dimensions. The first is that let's start with the data center. Data center has to be liquid cooling ready. And so that's a place where there's a bunch of capital build-out that's happening, but it's an important part of the investment, right, because you actually need to plumb the data center for liquid point. Second, for us, in terms of IP is how you design the systems and the architecture and how you manufacture them. We have a factory in Chippewa Falls, we stood up a factory in the Czech Republic to manufacture this. To my knowledge, they're the 2 largest scale factories in the world for building liquid cooling systems. And then you have to design the systems for liquid cooling, which is quite different than just simply air cooling because you're -- what you're not actually -- you're dealing with heat dissipation across every component. So you think about fans and you're like, "Okay, I can just replace the fans. You can't just replace the fans because you've now got to make sure you're liquid cooling the CPU, the accelerator, the memory, the drive. If you're going to put a full liquid cooling system in and have it be fully [ neutral ], you actually have to liquid cool the fabric and the switches, right, as well. So that's what we do in a supercomputer. And that's the kind of capability and the IP we're bringing more broadly. The third part of it is then you need people that actually know how to deploy these things and manage the services and implement them. And that may sound simple, but it turns out if you pull out the wrong plug when you're servicing 1 of these things, you can have a pretty significant water leak, right? And the other part of servicing is you actually have to maintain the water. The water running through these things, if you think about it is getting heated and cooled. It's getting subjected to different thermal dynamics. It's getting -- sometimes it's getting subjected to light. And so we have to manage that. So we have to chemically treat the water. And we have expertise in all these areas from manufacturing to system design to the service and deployment. And then of course, there's the ecosystem behind that of components and parts. But I think when you look at it, the 3 things that we do today, we're well ahead of the market, and we understand how to make this repeatable and scalable. And I see it even in how fast we can deploy a supercomputer today that's liquid cooled versus what we were able to do just a couple of years ago when I started.

Antonio Neri

executive
#105

The bottom line, we had a unique invest base. This is what makes us attractive because customers who need to deploy at the scale they need the services. In our HP services business is a significant point of differentiation. You can go buy commodity and then have someone else build it for you. We deploy the entire solution for the customer from beginning to the end. And that IP is very unique for us. And that's what it requires in an AI-native architecture. And I think that's something that we're going to leverage as we go forward. So I think we are...

Jeremy Cox

executive
#106

Why don't we hold it there?

Antonio Neri

executive
#107

Yes. So we appreciate your time and investment. So we are happy to be back at the New York Exchange. We want to thank the New York Exchange for the hospitality. I think we have walked you through our strategy in better detail. We have given you a lot of information that takes time, but one of the feedback here given to us is the fact that you want to understand how we compete in the market. I think we have laid the case very clear in each of the business segments, what is our differentiation? So I hope you got greater insight on the value HP has captured through our strategic pivot, which obviously is seeing the numbers to higher growth and higher margin areas. And as the market expands in these areas where we have made investments or we are going to double down the investment. I think it's making us not just relevant, but also will create greater value for our shareholders. I believe HPE is an excellent opportunity to invest. I think our guidance is logical considering some of the things we have to deal with HPC and not. But we are very confident in what we're doing. And the reason why I'm confident is because customers are coming to us. That's the bottom line. When you spend the time, I spend as they do more than 50% with customers, gives me the confidence that we can go and execute what we show you and accelerate our value for our shareholders. So thank you. I know there is a little bit of mingling here. Thank you for the audience on the webcast for staying with us.

Jeremy Cox

executive
#108

Not too much, though.

Antonio Neri

executive
#109

All right. Thank you.

Justin Hotard

executive
#110

Thank you.

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