Hewlett Packard Enterprise vs Salesforce: A Comprehensive Technical Comparison

In today’s enterprise technology landscape, organizations face critical decisions when selecting platforms and solutions to drive their digital transformation initiatives. Two major players in this space are Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Salesforce, each with distinct approaches to solving enterprise challenges. While HPE comes from a hardware-centric legacy expanding into comprehensive enterprise solutions, Salesforce built its empire on cloud-based customer relationship management that has evolved into a platform ecosystem. This technical comparison examines both companies’ offerings, architectures, capabilities, and strategic directions to provide cybersecurity professionals and IT decision-makers with the insights needed to evaluate these solutions against their organizational requirements.

Company Background and Strategic Evolution

The histories of HPE and Salesforce represent two distinct trajectories in enterprise technology. Understanding these evolutionary paths provides context for their current offerings and strategic positioning.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE): Hardware Roots to Hybrid Solutions

Hewlett Packard Enterprise emerged from the 2015 split of the iconic Hewlett-Packard Company, which had been a pioneer in computing hardware since 1939. The separation created HPE, focused on enterprise hardware, software, and services, while HP Inc. retained the personal computing and printing businesses. This strategic split allowed HPE to concentrate its resources on enterprise-level solutions without the constraints of consumer market considerations.

HPE’s evolution reflects the transition from traditional hardware provider to hybrid IT solutions company. The organization has substantially invested in edge computing, high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence, and GreenLake, its as-a-service platform. Through strategic acquisitions like SimpliVity (hyperconverged infrastructure), Nimble Storage (all-flash storage), and Cray (supercomputers), HPE has assembled a comprehensive portfolio addressing diverse enterprise computing needs.

A pivotal moment in HPE’s strategy occurred in 2019 when CEO Antonio Neri announced that by 2022, HPE would offer its entire portfolio through as-a-service models, signaling a significant business model transformation from capital expenditure sales to subscription-based consumption. This initiative directly positions HPE to compete in the cloud-dominated landscape where Salesforce has thrived.

Salesforce: Cloud Pioneer to Platform Ecosystem

Founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Salesforce revolutionized software delivery through its “No Software” campaign, championing the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model when on-premises installations dominated. The company’s initial focus on customer relationship management (CRM) provided a springboard for expansion into a comprehensive cloud platform.

Salesforce’s strategic growth has been fueled by both organic development and major acquisitions, including ExactTarget (marketing automation), MuleSoft (integration platform), Tableau (data visualization), and most recently, Slack (workplace communication). Each acquisition has extended Salesforce beyond CRM into a platform supporting the entire customer journey and connected enterprise workflows.

The introduction of Force.com in 2007 marked Salesforce’s transformation from a CRM provider to a platform company, allowing customers and partners to build custom applications on Salesforce infrastructure. This platform approach has created a robust ecosystem of developers, partners, and applications that extend core functionality, a significant competitive advantage against traditional enterprise vendors like HPE.

Core Technology Architectures

The architectural foundations of HPE and Salesforce reflect their different origins and reveal their strategic priorities.

HPE: Hybrid Infrastructure with GreenLake Focus

HPE’s architecture emphasizes flexibility across deployment models, with solutions spanning on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. At the core of this strategy is HPE GreenLake, a platform that brings cloud-like experiences to applications and data wherever they reside. The platform provides a control plane for managing infrastructure, workloads, and data with consumption-based pricing.

From a technical perspective, HPE’s architecture incorporates several key components:

• Intelligent Edge solutions: Aruba networking products and edge computing platforms designed for processing data near its source
• Hybrid IT infrastructure: Server technologies (ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo), storage solutions (Primera, Nimble, StoreOnce), and HPC systems (Cray supercomputers)
• Management software: HPE OneView for infrastructure management and HPE InfoSight for AI-driven operations
• Security framework: Silicon Root of Trust technology embedded in HPE servers, providing hardware-level security that extends through the entire infrastructure stack

The HPE Ezmeral software portfolio represents a critical component of this architecture, providing a container platform for modernizing applications, a data fabric for managing data across environments, and ML operations capabilities for machine learning workloads. This software layer integrates with the underlying hardware infrastructure to enable consistent management across hybrid deployments.

Consider this code example demonstrating how HPE’s RESTful API can be used to interact with infrastructure programmatically:

import requests
import json

# HPE OneView API connection
base_url = "https://oneview.example.com"
api_version = 1200
auth_endpoint = "/rest/login-sessions"
server_endpoint = "/rest/server-hardware"

# Authentication
headers = {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
    'X-API-Version': api_version
}

auth_body = {
    'userName': 'admin',
    'password': 'password'
}

# Get authentication token
auth_response = requests.post(
    base_url + auth_endpoint, 
    headers=headers, 
    data=json.dumps(auth_body), 
    verify=False
)

token = auth_response.json()['sessionID']
headers['Auth'] = token

# Retrieve server information
server_response = requests.get(
    base_url + server_endpoint, 
    headers=headers, 
    verify=False
)

servers = server_response.json()
for server in servers['members']:
    print(f"Server: {server['name']}, Status: {server['status']}")

Salesforce: Multi-tenant Cloud Platform

Salesforce’s architecture is fundamentally built on multi-tenancy, where multiple customers share the same infrastructure, applications, and database while maintaining data isolation. This architecture enables Salesforce to achieve economies of scale, push updates to all customers simultaneously, and maintain a consistent experience across its customer base.

The technical components of Salesforce’s architecture include:

• Salesforce Platform: The foundation layer providing shared services including authentication, API management, data storage, and workflow capabilities
• Lightning Platform: Development environment for building custom applications using Salesforce’s proprietary Apex programming language and Lightning Web Components framework
• Heroku: Platform-as-a-Service offering for developing applications in standard languages like Java, Node.js, and Python
• MuleSoft: Integration platform connecting different systems and data sources
• Einstein AI: Artificial intelligence layer providing predictive analytics and recommendation capabilities across Salesforce products

Salesforce organizes its platform into discrete “clouds” focused on specific business functions, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and others. These clouds share the underlying platform capabilities while providing specialized features for their target use cases.

From a development perspective, Salesforce’s architecture enables both declarative (“clicks not code”) application building and programmatic customization through Apex code and Lightning components. Here’s an example of Apex code demonstrating a trigger that automates business logic when opportunities are modified:

trigger OpportunityTrigger on Opportunity (before update) {
    // Create a set to store Account IDs
    Set accountIds = new Set();
    
    // Collect all Account IDs from the updated Opportunities
    for (Opportunity opp : Trigger.new) {
        Opportunity oldOpp = Trigger.oldMap.get(opp.Id);
        
        // If the opportunity amount has increased by more than 50%
        if (opp.Amount > oldOpp.Amount * 1.5) {
            accountIds.add(opp.AccountId);
        }
    }
    
    // If we have accounts to process
    if (!accountIds.isEmpty()) {
        // Query for related account data
        Map accountMap = new Map([
            SELECT Id, Name, Total_Opportunity_Amount__c 
            FROM Account 
            WHERE Id IN :accountIds
        ]);
        
        // Create a task for the account owner for each significant opportunity increase
        List tasksToCreate = new List();
        
        for (Opportunity opp : Trigger.new) {
            if (accountIds.contains(opp.AccountId)) {
                Account relatedAccount = accountMap.get(opp.AccountId);
                
                Task t = new Task();
                t.Subject = 'Significant opportunity increase for ' + relatedAccount.Name;
                t.Description = 'Opportunity ' + opp.Name + ' has increased significantly.';
                t.Priority = 'High';
                t.OwnerId = opp.OwnerId;
                t.WhatId = opp.Id;
                
                tasksToCreate.add(t);
            }
        }
        
        // Insert the tasks
        if (!tasksToCreate.isEmpty()) {
            insert tasksToCreate;
        }
    }
}

Product Portfolio Comparison

The product portfolios of HPE and Salesforce reflect their distinct approaches to enterprise technology, with limited overlap but increasing convergence in certain areas.

HPE’s Enterprise Hardware and Software Portfolio

HPE’s product portfolio spans computing, storage, networking, and software solutions designed for enterprise data centers, edge environments, and hybrid cloud deployments.

Category	Key Products	Primary Use Cases
Compute	ProLiant Servers, Synergy, Apollo Systems, Superdome Flex	General-purpose computing, mission-critical workloads, HPC, AI training
Storage	Primera, Nimble Storage, SimpliVity, StoreOnce	Mission-critical storage, hybrid cloud storage, data protection, hyperconverged infrastructure
Networking	Aruba Switching, Aruba Wireless, Software-Defined Networking	Campus networks, data center networks, SD-WAN, edge computing
Software	HPE GreenLake, HPE Ezmeral, HPE OneView, HPE InfoSight	Infrastructure management, container orchestration, ML operations, AI-driven operations
Services	HPE Pointnext, HPE Financial Services	Advisory services, implementation services, financing and asset management

The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform has become the focal point of HPE’s strategy, offering a consumption-based model that brings cloud-like experiences to applications and data regardless of location. GreenLake combines infrastructure, software, and services into an integrated offering that can be deployed in customer data centers, colocation facilities, or edge locations.

HPE’s SGI Management Center, one of the components acquired in the SGI acquisition, provides specialized management for high-performance computing environments. This solution differs significantly from Salesforce’s offerings, focusing on the unique requirements of supercomputing and technical computing workloads.

Salesforce’s Cloud-Based Applications and Platform

Salesforce’s product portfolio is organized around specialized “clouds” addressing different business functions, all built on the common Salesforce Platform foundation.

Product	Key Capabilities	Primary Use Cases
Sales Cloud	Contact management, opportunity tracking, sales forecasting, quote-to-cash	Sales automation, pipeline management, sales analytics
Service Cloud	Case management, knowledge base, omnichannel support, field service	Customer service, help desk operations, self-service portals
Marketing Cloud	Email marketing, mobile messaging, social media management, advertising	Multi-channel campaigns, customer journeys, personalization
Commerce Cloud	E-commerce storefronts, order management, merchandising	B2C and B2B online commerce, unified commerce experiences
Experience Cloud	Portal creation, community management, content management	Customer portals, partner portals, employee intranets
Tableau	Data visualization, analytics dashboards, data preparation	Business intelligence, data exploration, embedded analytics
MuleSoft	API management, integration platform, connectors	System integration, API strategy, data integration
Slack	Channel-based messaging, workflows, integrations	Team collaboration, business process automation, virtual HQ

Salesforce offers several editions of its products, each targeting different customer sizes and requirements:

• Essentials: Entry-level offering for small businesses with basic CRM functionality
• Professional: Mid-tier offering with complete CRM capabilities for growing businesses
• Enterprise: Comprehensive offering with advanced customization and integration features
• Unlimited: Premium offering with maximum functionality and dedicated support

The Salesforce Platform enables customers to extend core functionality through custom application development using tools like Lightning App Builder (for declarative development) and Apex (for programmatic development). This extensibility has created a vast ecosystem of third-party applications available through the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace.

Technical Capabilities and Feature Comparison

When comparing HPE and Salesforce, it’s crucial to understand their respective technical capabilities and how they address different aspects of enterprise technology needs.

Data Management and Analytics

HPE’s data management approach centers on managing data across hybrid environments. The company’s Ezmeral Data Fabric (formerly MapR) provides a unified data platform that enables organizations to store, manage, and process data across on-premises, cloud, and edge locations. This platform supports both structured and unstructured data, with capabilities for data replication, data protection, and real-time data streaming.

For analytics, HPE offers several solutions including:

• HPE Ezmeral ML Ops: Platform for managing the machine learning lifecycle from development to deployment
• HPE GreenLake for Analytics: As-a-service offering for deploying analytics workloads
• HPE Superdome Flex: In-memory computing platform for real-time analytics on massive datasets

Salesforce’s data management capabilities are built into its platform, with a focus on managing customer data across business processes. The platform uses a multi-tenant architecture where customer data is stored in a shared database infrastructure but logically separated. Key data management features include:

• Data Model: Flexible schema supporting standard and custom objects with relationships
• Data Governance: Role-based access controls, field-level security, and sharing rules
• Data Integration: APIs for data import/export and MuleSoft for integration with external systems

For analytics, Salesforce offers a comprehensive suite through its acquisition of Tableau and native capabilities:

• Tableau: Advanced data visualization and analytics platform
• Einstein Analytics: AI-powered analytics with predictive capabilities
• Reports and Dashboards: Native reporting tools for operational insights

The fundamental difference in data management approaches reflects the companies’ core focus: HPE emphasizes infrastructure-level data management across environments, while Salesforce focuses on business-level data management within its platform ecosystem.

Security and Compliance

Security represents a critical consideration for both HPE and Salesforce, though their approaches reflect their different architectural foundations.

HPE’s security framework begins at the hardware level with Silicon Root of Trust, which embeds security directly into the silicon of HPE servers. This technology creates an immutable fingerprint that verifies firmware code is valid and uncompromised before allowing it to execute. The security architecture extends through the stack with:

• Server security: Cryptographically signed firmware, secure boot, runtime firmware validation
• Network security: Aruba’s Zero Trust Security framework, dynamic segmentation, and policy enforcement
• Data security: Encryption for data at rest and in transit, key management integration
• Security automation: AI-based threat detection and response through InfoSight

HPE’s approach allows organizations to implement security controls appropriate to their regulatory environment and security policies, with solutions that can be deployed in air-gapped environments for the highest security requirements.

Salesforce implements a multi-layered security model within its cloud platform:

• Physical security: Secure data centers with controlled access and environmental protections
• Network security: Firewalls, intrusion detection, and DDoS protection
• Application security: OWASP-based secure development practices, vulnerability scanning
• Data security: Encryption at rest (Shield Platform Encryption) and in transit (TLS)
• Identity and access: Multi-factor authentication, single sign-on integration, IP restrictions
• Monitoring: Event Monitoring API for security analytics and forensics

Salesforce maintains numerous compliance certifications including SOC 1/2/3, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA compliance capabilities. The platform provides tools like Salesforce Shield for meeting regulatory requirements around data encryption, event monitoring, and field audit trails.

A key distinction is that HPE customers retain direct control over their security infrastructure and policies, while Salesforce customers rely on Salesforce’s security implementations with configuration options. This difference is significant for organizations in highly regulated industries or with specific security requirements that may necessitate complete control over the security stack.

Development and Customization

The development paradigms for HPE and Salesforce reflect their fundamentally different approaches to enterprise technology.

HPE provides infrastructure and platforms on which developers can build applications using standard development tools and frameworks. The company’s development-related offerings include:

• HPE Ezmeral Container Platform: Kubernetes-based environment for deploying containerized applications
• HPE Ezmeral ML Ops: Platform for machine learning development and operationalization
• HPE GreenLake API: Programmatic interfaces for infrastructure management
• HPE Developer Community: Resources and tools for developers working with HPE technologies

Developers working with HPE technologies typically use standard languages and frameworks such as Python, Java, Go, and Terraform, following DevOps and infrastructure-as-code practices. The focus is on providing flexible infrastructure that supports diverse application architectures and deployment patterns.

Salesforce, by contrast, offers a comprehensive platform for building business applications specifically within its ecosystem. Development options include:

• Declarative development: Point-and-click tools like Lightning App Builder, Process Builder, and Flow
• Programmatic development: Apex (Java-like proprietary language), Visualforce (MVC framework), and Lightning Web Components (modern JavaScript framework)
• Integration development: API-first architecture with REST, SOAP, Bulk, and Streaming APIs
• Heroku: Platform-as-a-Service for developing applications in standard languages that can integrate with Salesforce

The Salesforce development model emphasizes rapid application development through declarative tools while providing programmatic options for complex requirements. The proprietary nature of Salesforce’s development platform creates a distinct ecosystem with specialized skills and practices.

Here’s a comparison of how a similar business process might be implemented in each environment:

Requirement	HPE Implementation Approach	Salesforce Implementation Approach
Automated workflow for order processing	Deploy containerized microservices on HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, with each service handling a step in the process	Build a Flow in Salesforce that automates the order process steps using declarative tools
Data integration between systems	Implement integration services using standard tools like Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ running on HPE infrastructure	Use MuleSoft to create integrations between Salesforce and external systems
Machine learning for predictive analytics	Develop models using frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch and deploy using HPE ML Ops	Implement Einstein Prediction Builder to create predictive models without coding

Total Cost of Ownership and Pricing Models

The cost structures of HPE and Salesforce reflect their fundamentally different business models and deployment approaches.

HPE’s Hybrid Pricing Model

HPE offers multiple purchasing models, transitioning from traditional capital expenditure approaches to consumption-based services:

• Traditional purchase: Upfront capital expenditure for hardware and software with support contracts
• Leasing and financing: HPE Financial Services options for spreading payments over time
• HPE GreenLake: Consumption-based model with pay-per-use pricing for infrastructure deployed on-premises or at the edge

The total cost of ownership (TCO) for HPE solutions includes several components:

• Initial hardware and software acquisition
• Implementation and integration services
• Ongoing support and maintenance
• Infrastructure operating costs (power, cooling, data center space)
• Personnel costs for administration and management
• Upgrade and refresh costs over the solution lifecycle

HPE GreenLake aims to simplify this cost structure by providing a single monthly bill based on actual resource consumption with built-in headroom for growth. This approach reduces upfront capital requirements but typically comes with minimum commitment terms and baseline capacity requirements.

Industry analyses suggest that HPE solutions generally have a higher initial implementation cost compared to pure cloud solutions but may offer lower total costs over a multi-year period for stable workloads with predictable resource requirements.

Salesforce’s Subscription-Based Pricing

Salesforce employs a pure subscription model with per-user pricing that varies by product and edition. The company’s pricing structure includes:

• User licenses: Per-user monthly or annual subscriptions with different license types (full users, platform users, community users)
• Editions: Tiered pricing based on functionality (Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited)
• Add-ons: Optional capabilities like Einstein Analytics, Shield, CPQ that carry additional costs
• API calls: Limits based on edition with additional costs for exceeding limits
• Storage: Base allocation included with additional storage available for purchase

As a specific example, Sales Cloud pricing ranges from $25 per user per month for Essentials to $300 per user per month for Unlimited Edition (annual billing), with each tier providing progressively more capabilities and higher limits.

The TCO for Salesforce implementations includes:

• Subscription costs for users and add-on products
• Implementation services (internal or partner)
• Integration development and maintenance
• Ongoing administration and customization
• Training and change management
• Additional third-party applications from AppExchange

While Salesforce eliminates infrastructure costs, the subscription model can lead to significant ongoing expenses that scale with user count. Organizations must carefully manage license assignments and monitor usage to control costs effectively.

Comparative TCO Analysis

When comparing the total cost of ownership between HPE and Salesforce solutions, several factors influence the relative cost-effectiveness:

Factor	HPE Considerations	Salesforce Considerations
Deployment timelines	Typically longer implementation cycles, especially for complex infrastructure	Shorter time-to-value with pre-built applications and declarative customization
Scalability costs	Step changes in cost when adding infrastructure capacity	Linear scaling with user count, potentially leading to “subscription sprawl”
Resource utilization	Customer responsible for capacity planning and utilization	Shared infrastructure with costs unrelated to actual resource consumption
Long-term cost trajectory	Generally decreasing cost per compute unit over time	Historical trend of price increases and add-on features
Exit costs	Higher application portability but potential stranded hardware assets	Data export and migration costs, potential vendor lock-in

According to industry analysis, HPE solutions typically have a higher initial cost of implementation compared to Salesforce but may offer advantages for specific use cases such as data-intensive applications with consistent resource requirements or environments with specific compliance requirements that necessitate on-premises deployment.

Real-world Performance and User Experience

Beyond technical specifications and pricing, the actual performance and experience delivered by HPE and Salesforce solutions significantly influence their value to organizations.

HPE Performance Characteristics

HPE’s performance strengths lie in its hardware engineering and optimization capabilities, particularly for specialized workloads:

• High-performance computing: HPE’s acquisition of Cray brought supercomputing expertise, with systems capable of petaflops of processing power for scientific and research applications
• Storage performance: All-flash array solutions like HPE Primera deliver sub-millisecond latency for mission-critical applications
• Memory-driven computing: The Memory-Driven Computing architecture provides massive shared memory pools for data-intensive applications
• Networking performance: Aruba networking solutions support high-bandwidth, low-latency connections with features for optimizing application traffic

The user experience for HPE solutions varies significantly based on the specific products and their implementation. Infrastructure management interfaces like HPE OneView provide unified management but typically require specialized IT knowledge. HPE has invested in improving management experiences through:

• HPE InfoSight: AI-driven management that proactively identifies and resolves issues
• GreenLake Central: Cloud-like management console for hybrid infrastructure
• Automation capabilities: APIs and integrations with infrastructure-as-code tools

Customer feedback indicates that HPE solutions deliver strong performance for targeted workloads but may require significant expertise to implement and optimize. The transition to GreenLake consumption-based models has simplified some aspects of the experience but still involves more complexity than pure cloud solutions.

Salesforce Performance Characteristics

Salesforce’s performance centers on business process automation and data management within its multi-tenant cloud environment:

• Transaction processing: Optimized for high-volume business transactions with governor limits to ensure fair resource allocation
• User scalability: Support for large user populations with predictable performance
• Search and reporting: Indexed search capabilities and report generation optimized for business data
• Mobile performance: Native mobile applications optimized for field users

The Salesforce user experience is designed for business users rather than IT specialists, with:

• Lightning Experience: Modern, responsive user interface with customizable components
• Role-based views: Tailored interfaces for different user types
• Mobile-first design: Full-featured mobile applications for iOS and Android
• AI-enhanced interactions: Einstein features providing intelligent recommendations and automations

Salesforce publishes real-time performance data through trust.salesforce.com, providing transparency into system availability and performance. The platform’s multi-tenant architecture can experience performance variability during peak periods or with poorly optimized customizations, a phenomenon sometimes called the “multi-tenant noisy neighbor problem.”

Comparative Performance Analysis

Direct performance comparisons between HPE and Salesforce are challenging due to their different focus areas, but several patterns emerge from user experiences:

• Control vs. convenience: HPE provides greater control over performance optimization but requires more expertise, while Salesforce offers convenience with less control
• Customization impact: Both platforms can experience performance degradation with suboptimal customizations, but the impact mechanisms differ
• Scaling characteristics: HPE requires proactive capacity planning for performance at scale, while Salesforce handles infrastructure scaling automatically but enforces governor limits
• Performance predictability: HPE environments typically provide more consistent performance for optimized workloads, while Salesforce performance can vary with platform-wide demand

Organizations report that HPE solutions excel for specialized, compute-intensive workloads with specific performance requirements, while Salesforce delivers stronger performance for standardized business processes with moderate computation needs.

Strategic Fit and Decision Criteria

Choosing between HPE and Salesforce—or determining how to leverage both vendors—requires aligning their capabilities with organizational requirements and strategic priorities.

Key Decision Factors

Several critical factors influence the strategic fit of HPE and Salesforce solutions:

• Deployment model preferences: Organizations with requirements for on-premises or edge deployments may find HPE’s hybrid approach more suitable, while those embracing cloud-first strategies may prefer Salesforce’s SaaS model
• Data sovereignty and compliance requirements: Regulatory environments that mandate specific data location or control capabilities may favor HPE’s flexible deployment options
• Existing technology investments: Organizations with significant investments in data center infrastructure may find HPE’s solutions more compatible with their current environment
• Specialized workload requirements: Compute-intensive applications like AI training, high-performance computing, or real-time analytics may be better served by HPE’s purpose-built hardware
• Business process focus: Organizations prioritizing customer-facing processes like sales, service, and marketing may find Salesforce’s specialized applications more directly applicable
• Development approach: Teams with expertise in traditional development languages and frameworks may prefer HPE’s open infrastructure, while those seeking rapid application development may favor Salesforce’s platform
• Cost structure preferences: Capital expenditure models versus operational expenditure preferences influence which vendor’s pricing approach better aligns with financial strategies

Complementary Capabilities

While this comparison has focused on contrasting HPE and Salesforce, many organizations leverage both vendors for complementary capabilities:

• HPE infrastructure running Salesforce integrations: Using HPE servers and networking to host MuleSoft runtime engines or custom applications that integrate with Salesforce
• Data management ecosystem: HPE storage solutions managing enterprise data lakes that complement Salesforce’s CRM data
• Edge-to-cloud scenarios: HPE edge computing processing IoT data that is then summarized and sent to Salesforce for business process integration
• High-performance analytics: Using HPE’s analytics capabilities for deep data processing and feeding insights into Salesforce for business user consumption

This complementary approach recognizes that most enterprises require both infrastructure capabilities and specialized business applications, with HPE and Salesforce each providing distinct value in their respective domains.

Industry-Specific Considerations

Different industries have unique requirements that influence the relative suitability of HPE and Salesforce solutions:

Industry	HPE Advantages	Salesforce Advantages
Financial Services	High-security infrastructure for sensitive data, mission-critical reliability for transaction systems	Financial Services Cloud with specialized capabilities for wealth management and banking relationships
Healthcare	Edge computing for medical devices, high-performance computing for genomics research	Health Cloud with patient relationship management and care coordination
Manufacturing	Edge computing for factory floor, private 5G networks, industrial IoT platforms	Manufacturing Cloud with inventory management, order processing, and channel management
Retail	In-store edge computing, real-time inventory systems, point-of-sale integration	Commerce Cloud with unified commerce experiences, marketing personalization
Government	FedRAMP-compliant infrastructure, air-gapped secure environments, long-term sustainment	Government Cloud with security and compliance controls for public sector

These industry patterns highlight how the distinct capabilities of each vendor align with sector-specific requirements and priorities.

Future Directions and Strategic Evolution

Understanding the strategic trajectories of HPE and Salesforce provides insight into how their offerings and competitive positioning may evolve.

HPE’s Strategic Direction

HPE has articulated several strategic priorities that will shape its future offerings:

• Edge-to-cloud platform strategy: Continuing development of the GreenLake platform to provide a unified experience across all deployment locations
• AI-driven operations: Expanding InfoSight capabilities to enable autonomous operations across the infrastructure stack
• Sustainable computing: Innovations in energy-efficient computing and circular economy approaches to IT equipment
• Specialized computing architectures: Development of purpose-built systems for emerging workloads like quantum computing simulation and AI training
• Consumption model expansion: Extending the as-a-service model to encompass more of the portfolio with simplified consumption

HPE’s acquisition strategy has focused on technologies that enhance its core infrastructure capabilities or extend into adjacent markets. Recent acquisitions like Cray (supercomputing), Silver Peak (SD-WAN), and Zerto (data protection) reflect this focused approach to portfolio expansion.

The company faces challenges from hyperscale cloud providers and the ongoing shift of workloads to public cloud environments. HPE’s response has been to position itself as an enabler of hybrid cloud strategies rather than competing directly with public cloud infrastructure.

Salesforce’s Strategic Direction

Salesforce has outlined several strategic initiatives guiding its evolution:

• Industry clouds expansion: Development of industry-specific solutions with pre-built processes and data models
• Slack-first customer experience: Integration of Slack as the engagement layer across Salesforce applications
• Hyperforce infrastructure: Re-architecture of Salesforce to leverage public cloud infrastructure for improved scalability and regional deployment
• Einstein AI enhancements: Expanding AI capabilities across the platform with more predictive and prescriptive features
• B2C to B2B to B2B2C expansion: Bridging customer experience across complex business relationships and networks

Salesforce’s acquisition strategy has been more expansive than HPE’s, with major acquisitions expanding the company beyond its CRM roots into adjacent markets like data visualization (Tableau), integration (MuleSoft), and workplace collaboration (Slack).

Challenges for Salesforce include increasing competition in the CRM space, customer concerns about pricing and complexity, and the need to demonstrate value from its major acquisitions. The company’s response has focused on deeper integration across its portfolio and emphasis on time-to-value for customers.

Convergence and Competition

While HPE and Salesforce have historically operated in different domains of enterprise technology, several trends are creating areas of convergence and potential competition:

• Edge computing and IoT: Both companies are developing capabilities for edge use cases, with HPE focusing on infrastructure and Salesforce on business process integration
• Data management and analytics: HPE’s data fabric and Salesforce’s data cloud represent different approaches to managing enterprise data assets
• AI and machine learning: Both vendors are investing in AI capabilities, with different emphasis on infrastructure versus application-level intelligence
• Consumption-based models: HPE’s GreenLake and Salesforce’s subscription pricing represent different implementations of consumption-based technology

These areas of convergence suggest that while HPE and Salesforce will likely maintain their core focus areas, their offerings will increasingly interact in hybrid enterprise architectures where infrastructure decisions and application decisions become more interdependent.

Conclusion: Selecting the Right Solution for Enterprise Needs

The comparison between HPE and Salesforce illustrates the distinct approaches these vendors take to enterprise technology, with HPE focusing on flexible infrastructure deployed across environments and Salesforce delivering specialized business applications through a cloud platform.

For most organizations, the choice is not HPE versus Salesforce but rather how to effectively leverage both vendors’ strengths within a comprehensive technology strategy. Infrastructure decisions and application decisions represent different layers of the enterprise technology stack, with different requirements and evaluation criteria.

Key takeaways from this comparison include:

• HPE provides greater control and customization at the infrastructure level, making it suitable for organizations with specific performance, security, or deployment requirements
• Salesforce delivers rapid time-to-value for business processes through specialized applications and platform capabilities, with less infrastructure complexity
• The total cost of ownership for each solution depends heavily on specific requirements, usage patterns, and implementation approaches
• Both vendors are evolving toward consumption-based models that aim to simplify adoption and align costs with value
• Organizations increasingly implement hybrid architectures that combine on-premises infrastructure, edge computing, and multiple cloud services based on workload requirements

As the enterprise technology landscape continues to evolve, successful organizations will develop competencies in both infrastructure management and platform-based application development, selecting the right tools for each layer of their technology stack based on specific requirements and strategic priorities.

FAQ: Hewlett Packard Enterprise vs Salesforce