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HPE Says It's Relocating HQ To Houston From San Jose (cnbc.com) 81

Posted by BeauHD from the jumping-ship dept.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the latest tech company to shift its focus away from Silicon Valley, announcing Tuesday that it will relocate its headquarters from San Jose, California, to Houston, Texas. CNBC reports: "HPE's largest U.S. employment hub, Houston is an attractive market to recruit and retain future diverse talent, and is where the company is currently constructing a state-of-the-art new campus," the company said in its fourth quarter earnings release. It's unclear how many employees the move will affect, though the company said no layoffs will be with the move. HPE will keep the San Jose campus, and will consolidate some of its Bay Area sites there, it said.

For its fourth quarter, the company reported:

Revenue: $7.21 billion vs $6.88 billion expected, according to a consensus estimate from Refinitiv.
Earnings: $0.37 per share (adjusted), compared with $0.34 expected, as per Refinitiv.

The company also raised guidance for the 2021 fiscal year. Shares were little changed in after hours trading.
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HPE Says It's Relocating HQ To Houston From San Jose More

HPE Says It's Relocating HQ To Houston From San Jose

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  • San Jose vs. Houston (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:04PM (#60783820) Journal

    San Jose is where great companies are born.

    Houston is where they go to die.

    • Yeah these stories are always spun into 'proof' that the Bay Area is doing something wrong, but maybe instead of growing as much as possible and however possible forever, just let the lower-value, less innovate companies go do business wherever it's cheaper to do so? Better than turning yourself into Houston so companies like HP can move in.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yeah this is a great strategy, just ask Detroit.

      • Dont't forget though, Hewlett Packard Enterprises is NOT the same as the old Hewlett Packard, it's just a vestige.

        Having tech spread around the country is a good thing, it gives more opportunities for those who can't work from home to be able to live somewhere other than a tiny south bay bubble. But then, HPE isn't where you go if you want to work on engineering or technology.

    • Re:San Jose vs. Houston (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cats-paw ( 34890 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:21PM (#60783882) Homepage

      could be quite literally.

      They seem to have forgotten Houston was hit by a fairly bad hurricane not too long ago.

      The chances of it happening again, and again, are pretty good.

      So if they were just looking to save money, which is of course what they were looking for, seems like they could have found a better location.

      • Re:San Jose vs. Houston (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:33PM (#60784258)

        I think that they're well aware of that, since as I understand it, the whole reason they're building a new state-of-the-art campus is because their current one (the old Compaq headquarters) gets flooded out almost every time there's even a tropical storm.

        Hopefully they're building the new one on higher ground or at least on stilts (since there isn't much genuine high ground in the entire region).

        At least the earthquake risk is almost zero.

        • I lived in Houston for grades 7 and part of 8. As a kid, the flat terrain made bicycling easy. Less promising: drainage. We would float down the street on pool toys after a good storm. Decades later I was still finding rolls of degraded masking tape that my parents got to protect windows from a hurricane that did not arrive. The humidity is ... it supersaturated at least once. I believe the mosquitoes leave contrails. Neighbors across the street had lightning punch a hole in their roof. I was threat

      • Usually the person in charge of decisions like this are Houston based. That's what happened after Carly took over the company. She divided and conquered the HP culture by displacing its management with Compaq managers.

        Same thing is happening with their (what remained) manufacturing. A Houston person was in charge of the "where to move it " decision and (drum roll), it moved to Houston.

        Nevermind that the plant had to be relocated because it flooded too much or never mind the hurricanes.

        It's cronyism.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Ritz_Just_Ritz ( 883997 )

      Sounds like sour grapes.

      Companies will go to wherever it makes sense to go. They exist to make money for shareholders, not to cling to wherever they started.

      It sure doesn't seem like silicon valley residents care if companies leave, though it will just put more pressure on the government to either cut budgets or place more of the tax burden on residents.

      *shrug*

      • The headquarters aren't always that important. My current employers has a lot of offices and factories around the country, and the world. Our current and previous CEOs didn't even live and work where the "official" headquarters are and upper management isn't centralized.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          Headquarters are important to know where your tax base is. California is planning a wealth tax on all corporations headquartered there, even on out-of-state and international revenue, even after you leave the state (the question is how they will enforce that). As a response, tons of small and large companies are leaving CA.

          This is supposedly to address the typical "Irish sandwich with Dutch mayo" that these corporations do, but as evidenced elsewhere (EU), these corporations and most rich people have the fu

        • The headquarters aren't always that important.

          Exactly. Headquarters is where you have the bulk of your accounting, marketing, legal, HR, finance, real estate, and the like. Not to devalue them, but many people with those skills can be found in sufficient quantity in any major metropolitan area. It makes no sense to locate such employees in high-cost areas such as the Bay Area when there are plenty of capable employees in low-cost areas. In HPE's case in particular Houston already hosts their largest operational site and HPE's needed to replace thei

    • Re:San Jose vs. Houston (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:10PM (#60784206) Journal

      San Jose is where great companies are born.

      Houston is where they go to die.

      I've lived all over the country, including near San Jose and in Houston. San Jose is very nice and Houston is a hell-hole. People were not meant to live in Houston. New houses in Houston don't even have windows that can open, because you have to air condition the place 11 months of the year. Forget about sitting outside in the backyard, even at night, because it's 108 degrees F and the humidity is probably about 90%. There are no zoning laws in Houston, so there will be check cashing places and pawn shops next to new luxury homes and then an office building on the corner. The entire city is a concrete slab. One big traffic jam on 12-lane highways. And absolutely no thought to the flow of people. If you want to go to the grocery store 1.5 miles away, you have to get on an expressway. Also, it's a giant swamp with filthy bayous. The ground water is all at surface level, so it's really fetid and gross. If you stand still too long, black mold will grown on you. I lived through Hurricane Harvey there and there was 50 inches of water on my street. There are mosquitos the size of pigeons and three of them can carry a baby or small puppy away. Fuck Houston, seriously. If my company said they were moving to Houston, I'd tell them fuck you too. I spent one year there and I honestly believe that counts as time served in Purgatory.

      The only good things about Houston are the people, who are cool and decent and the food, which is spectacular. They've got taco trucks there that are heavenly,
        There is one in the First Ward, called "El Rojas" that puts the nopales and habeneros and holy shit I wish I had one a them right now, and you can get some of the world's great burnt meat (known as "BBQ") in Houston, too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        There are no zoning laws in Houston...

        If only! Houston still has minimum setbacks and maximum floor area ratios and minimum parking requirements. A city without zoning laws would look more like Japan [youtube.com].

        One big traffic jam on 12-lane highways.

        Yep, parking lots attract auto traffic the same way standing water in Houston attracts pigeon sized mosquitoes! The solution is so simple and obvious, but Houston is still far too much of a socialist utopia to allow the market to start deciding how much parking to build

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bob4u2c ( 73467 )
          Not sure I agree, while visiting relatives in Texas a few years ago the road ways and access points seemed by be designed on a spur of the moment thing.

          For example, while on the freeway you had to know to exit off to a side road about 2 miles before a right turn because the main connecting road into the town didn't have a direct freeway exit. It did have a freeway entrance though! So if you didn't turn 2 miles before, you drove another 5 miles down the road to the next exit, went over the freeway and dr

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by guruevi ( 827432 )

        Sounds like LA in summer. And in the winter you still can't open a window due to the tear gas and smoke from the looting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        So, how do you *really* feel about Houston? :)

        hawk

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PCM2 ( 4486 )

        The entire city is a concrete slab. One big traffic jam on 12-lane highways. And absolutely no thought to the flow of people. If you want to go to the grocery store 1.5 miles away, you have to get on an expressway.

        Somebody once told me that they expected to be able to bicycle when they moved to Houston, like they had done in their old town. Not only was this extremely difficult, because the roads were wide and there was absolutely no accommodation for bikes, but he said motorists would actually throw things at him as they drove by.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      This is why I am never surprised that conspiracy theories have so many adherents. Why so many people believe vaccines are a way to control the population. People believe anything. If a lie is repeated enough, people believe it.

      Do you know the company that reversed engineered the IBM PC and allowed all the cheap computers we now enjoy to exist? Do you who one of the companies was that created the transistor and TTL? Do you know where the greatest concentration of engineers are outside of Silicon Valle

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      Wasn't Houston where Compaq came from? And then Compaq became part of what is now HPE?

    • That should be enough time for the next climate-change empowered hurricane to rip through, and destroy their headquarters. I'm starting to think that every company moving to Houston is just trying to set up a deniable way to have their records destroyed in a flood. Why else would anyone move there?

      • The cool dry summer breezes? Last time I was in Houston I spent it hiding from the suffocating humidity in the underground bunker system that is the downtown tunnels. People were very nice though.

  • You don't move a tech company to Texas, or red states in general, to "recruit and retain future diverse talent", unless different kinds of protestant among your WASPs is the only kind of diversity you care about.

    You move your tech company to Texas because you've already failed and you're in a race to the bottom. You want to save a few bucks by underpaying and abusing your rank-and-file workers; drawing the decline out so the C-levels and presidents can squeeze out a few more bonus checks before deploying t

    • You are ignorant. Not quite half the people in Houston are white.

  • HP hasn't made anything worth crap in 15 years anyway. Everything they touch turns to dookie. I thought it was just Carly F. but their culture has run to crap even in her absence. DEC was a great company, Compaq was a decent company. The end result HP was/is a steaming pile of excrement...

  • I'd wager that people relocating from San Jose would feel more confortable in austin than in houston.

    Perhaps HPE has already a big precense in Houston. Or some big clients there (or both).

    As for the No Layoffs thing, while I suspect that the total number of employees will not change, I think this will be a great opportunity to get rid of some underperforming/not needed backoffice personnel that do not want to move, and subtitute them with fresh people (not necesarily at lower salaries, mind you) recruited l

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Not surprising considering the history (Score:3)

    by Cobalt Jacket ( 611660 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:50PM (#60783970)
    Houston is where Compaq was founded, and that is really the heart and soul of the modern HPE. This is just relocating their headquarters to be closer to their main operational center.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ebh ( 116526 )

      That explains Houston and not Richardson, where a lot of the pre-Compaq big iron was designed and built.

      • Richardson was the home of Convex computer. HP bought the company in order to get it's multi-processor enterprise architecture. Prior to that, HP designed its own computers, mostly in Cupertino for the larger systems that Convex/HP eventually designed later on.

    • When Hewlett Packard split I thought HP Inc. kept most of the old hardware tech (which is where I'd think the Compaq connection would be), and HPE was more of a cloud platform-as-a-service kind of company. (But I can't claim to be well-informed on the matter, so I my impression could be mistaken.)

      • Not exactly. HP is basically printers and the computer systems that were marketed to consumers. HPE is everything else (servers, cloud infrastructure, networking, HPC, enterprise services - for a while, etc.)

        • Exactly right. I have no idea why HPE didn't adopt a new name when it was split off from HP. There's likely a half-dozen legacy names they could have dusted off that would have been better at differentiating the businesses and avoiding confusion. Compaq, DEC, Convex, Apollo, and Tandem come to mind right away; I'm sure there's more.

          But another way to differentiate the two: If you or your office staff touches it, it's HP. If your data center staff touches it, it's HPE.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Megane ( 129182 )
          Don't forget the test equipment part (which some would say was the "real" HP), that was was spun off into Agilent and later Keysight.

    • Re:Not surprising considering the history (Score:4, Informative)

      by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @08:08PM (#60784196)

      Houston is where Compaq was founded, and that is really the heart and soul of the modern HPE. This is just relocating their headquarters to be closer to their main operational center.

      Well, compaq was only PCs. The Big Iron part of Compaq was in reality Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computers. So, If HPE (whici is mostly big Iron) were to relocate to the Heart and soul of something, should be either Massachusets, or from San jose to Cupertino.

      So no, the reason for the move to Houston must be something else, not "Houston is where Compaq was founded, and that is really the heart and soul of the modern HPE"

      The bulk of Compaq (cheapo PCs and Laptops) stayed with HP Ink. (pun intended)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The DEC hardware is totally defunct and the Tandem hardware is mostly so.

        Most of HPE's "Big Iron" is currently PC-derived rack and blade systems, much of which has passed down from Compaq's old server business.

      • Compaq was hardly only desktop/laptop PCs. They were one of the dominant PC server vendors prior to acquisition. This group went to HPE, not HP.

      • Well, compaq was only PCs. The Big Iron part of Compaq was in reality Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computers. So, If HPE (whici is mostly big Iron) were to relocate to the Heart and soul of something, should be either Massachusets, or from San jose to Cupertino.

        Tandem was literally around the corner from HP's Cupertino site (where I worked for nine years). Both got sold to Apple to build the spaceship.

  • USA USA USA! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Crowded ( 6202674 ) on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @06:52PM (#60783988)
    Who cares! It's a win: we get jobs back from Mexico.

    Suck it San Jose!

  • No Layoffs (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Hey look everybody, we're not laying anybody off! (Just that your job is now in Houston, move or quit.)

    They know the older, more expensive, folks are probably more tied down with houses and family that are not easily uprooted. So they get their layoffs and payroll down and the financial sector loves that for the short term benefits.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      tied down with houses

      Do you know what they can do if they sell their Silly Valley house and move to Texas? If they have half decent equity they can get a mini-mansion in a good part of town. Maybe it's not quite as nice looking as the far west hills of Austin, but better than a cookie-cutter exurb with a two hour commute.

  • Well, "Houston" was the first word said by a human on the moon.

  • I went through a move of the US HQ of my prior employer from Chicago to Houston, a decision made by the world HQ in London. Within 5 years, 85% of the folks in my department who were moved (at great expense to the company) were gone, a majority to move back to Chicago (including me). Houston was more cosmopolitan than I expected, with lots of Asian immigrants (although not the European ones you find in northern cities). And the weather is probably no worse on the whole than Chicago - it's just a differen

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      It's not hurricanes that are the big problem, it's flooding. Houston is basically built on a drained swamp. When Allison happened, I was watching their local news reports from a safe ~100 miles away, while sunken parts of I-10 were flooded like a bowl of automotive breakfast cereal. The most recent hurricane almost overflowed a flood reservoir on the west side of town.

      Last I knew (it's been years since my last visit), the Asians were primarily in the southwest part, from Sharpstown down to Sugarland. There

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