HPE celebrates 40 years of Bristol office

[Alex_Podmore]

Opening its doors in 1983, HPE’s Bristol office started life as a dedicated site for the Storage business unit, acting as an assembly line for disk-based storage before developing tape drives. With the Bristol team moving to a new site next year, we wanted to mark this milestone moment, and in October we invited over 300 current and previous employees back to celebrate.

Leading the way for Bristol tech

North Bristol is now considered a technology hub, and HP was one of the first tech companies in the area, leading the way in bringing in skills, almost like the UK’s very own Silicon Valley. By the mid-1990s, the site housed eight buildings hosting over 2500 workers across three shifts. With our own HR, finance, supply chain and marketing departments, the site was alive with industry, with the canteen providing three meals every day for workers. There was even an HSBC bank onsite!

Hitting $950m worth of products shipped in a single year, the site won the Queen’s Award for Export in 1995 and was, at one point, responsible for around 10% of the revenue of the entire global company. Growing in skill and success, the DDS and LTO tape formats were both developed at the Bristol site and produced many hundreds of millions of dollars profit for HPE, globally.

With labs opening their building in 1997, we welcomed Dave Packard (the ‘P’ in HPE) for the ground-breaking. This laid a foundation for the strong DNA of research and development that we still see within HPE today, developing HPE-owned IP and products for Storage, High-Performance Compute and the HPE GreenLake Cloud Platform.

Investing in our employees has always been a priority, focusing on creating a strong culture of community and engagement. We have witnessed the growth of our adaptable teams as they evolved from tape-based near-line products to disk-based solutions, then further to virtualised and online storage, then finally into the cloud-managed storage that we see today with HPE GreenLake.

With the largest number of HPE employees on one site in the UK, there is a tangible buzz of collaborative activity within the office, with regular social, health and charity events further promoting a sense of community and belonging.

Celebrating 40 years in style

The event on the 20th October 2023 offered an opportunity for Bristol office employees past and present to celebrate this ongoing community. Event organiser, Sharon Ledingham said, “The event is really important, as it brings back together such a lovely community. It has brought back people that worked here many years ago, so to see people reunite brings such a warmth to the building”.

With the Bristol operations moving just a mile down the road, it was a final chance to honour the incredible innovation and hard work that has taken place on the site. An exciting new chapter awaits the team, and Site Council team members acknowledged the poignancy of the celebration, saying, “It’s taken a lot of planning from Site Council, bringing over 300 current and ex-employees back together to celebrate 40 years of HPE history here at the site. It’s been great to see, especially as we are moving to our new offices next year”.

In true HPE fashion, the Bristol team’s commitment to innovation won’t stand still, and work will continue throughout their move and into the future, leading the way in tech innovation in Bristol.

Alex Podmore
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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