Dive Brief:
- HPE agreed to sell its Telco Solutions business to systems integrator HCLTech, the companies announced Thursday.
- The deal expands on HPE’s 2024 sale to HCLTech of carrier-focused assets, including business support systems and network applications. HCLTech secures HPE intellectual property, engineering talent and communications service provider relationships as a result of the Telco Solutions acquisition.
- HPE will continue to support carriers with its traditional networking portfolio, while handing off telecommunications-specific products to HCLTech. “The specialized expertise of our telco solutions business is a great fit for a systems integrator like HCLTech that serves this market specifically and can deliver innovation and impact to communications service providers,” Rami Rahim, HPE EVP, president and general manager of networking, said in a Thursday blog post.
Dive Insight:
HPE’s decision to shed some of its telecom assets coincides with a shift toward data center gear. The company closed on its $16 billion Juniper Networks acquisition earlier this year and saw AI-related orders surge in 2025.
It plans to increase its focus on networking, routing and security going forward, according to Rahim.
“To bring this vision to life, we are leaning into our areas of core strength and focusing on the areas where we can deliver the greatest value to customers and support our overall HPE business objectives,” Rahim said in the blog.
Telco Solutions was previously attached to HPE’s Communications Technology Group, which HCLTech completed its acquisition of a year ago.
“These parts of the business are complex, tend to involve custom integrations and did not fit with HPE’s focus on product-oriented software,” Dell’Oro Group Research Director Siân Morgan told Channel Dive in an email. “This latest announcement is a further step in that divestiture process: the sale of the OSS layer and Subscriber Management software. Although these applications are closer to the network than the BSS layer, they still involve a fair degree of customer-specific integration and specialization to telco networks.”
The move does not signal a full retreat from telco, however.
Private cellular core software provider Athonet, which HPE acquired in 2023, remains in the HPE networking unit.
“This sets HPE up nicely to position a complete wireless solution to enterprises, including both cellular and WLAN connectivity,” Morgan said. “This will also allow HPE to tackle one of the big hurdles for private cellular networks: the convergence of 3GPP network management — the traditional IT network management systems used by enterprises.”
HPE and HCLTech did not disclose the financial details of the deal, which is expected to close in six months, following regulatory approval.
