Diversity of talent was a large part of what attracted Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s headquarters to the Houston region, President and CEO Antonio Neri said April 19.
Speaking at the Greater Houston Partnership’s first State of Technology event, Neri reiterated that moving HPE’s headquarters from Silicon Valley to the Houston area gives the company the best of both worlds. HPE will maintain a large workforce focused on product innovation in San Jose, California, and its corporate headquarters in the Spring area will give the company access to a large, diverse talent base in Texas, Neri said. With several thousand local employees, Houston is already HPE’s second largest site in the world, outside of India.
Houston and Texas overall have a lot to offer corporations considering relocating. But what HPE found to be among Houston’s most attractive features was its diversity, Neri said.
“For me, it was all about getting access to diverse talent and being able to develop that talent in the long-term,” Neri said.
Neri, who lived in Houston from 2007 through 2015 while working as an executive with predecessor firm Hewlett-Packard Co., said that diversity in a company helps make that company better. He said HPE has to do “way more work” around inclusion and diversity, but that it can be hard to do in the competitive San Francisco Bay Area market.
“I was born in Argentina; I am a son of immigrants, Italians. I have lived pretty much everywhere around the globe, and I work with very diverse teams,” Neri said. “And I can tell you, when you add diversity to the teams — diversity of thought, ethnicity, gender — it makes you stronger.”
In October 2018, plans were revealed for HPE's new campus, which is being built in CityPlace at Springwoods Village. Now the future headquarters campus, which is scheduled for completion in 2022, will house employees in a variety of functions for HPE, including technology teams working on new computing architectures and the company’s as-a-service offerings. HPE first unveiled plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from San Jose to the Houston region in December 2020, and it quickly changed its headquarters location with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to its existing Houston location, the former Compaq campus near Highway 249.
With $29.14 billion in 2019 revenue, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (NYSE: HPE) would have ranked No. 8 on the Houston Business Journal's 2020 Largest Houston-Based Public Companies List. The firm recorded revenue of $26.98 billion in 2020.
