A Sun North America sales SVP has been poached by HP to do the same job for the Palo Alto company, signalling that it wants to switch Sun resellers (and customers) to HP ones.

Randy Seidl becomes the boss of HP's Enterprise Storage, Servers (ESS) and Networking operation in the USA and Canada, and will report to ex-EMC storage head David Donatelli, HP's brand shiny spanking new Exec VP for Enterprise Servers and Networking. You'll notice that Donatelli doesn't manage enterprise storage at HP and the question about who Seidl will report to about his enterprise storage activities is left unasked and unanswered. The answer is probably Donatelli's boss, Ann Livermore. Donatelli has had to recuse himself from all discussions of that topic, as he is in purdah from it, courtesy of an EMC law-suit, until the end of the year.

HP says Seidl brings "a successful track record of sales growth, profitability and market share gains" and that Seidl and his team achieved margin growth of 80 percent and revenue growth of 35 percent from fiscal year 2006 to fiscal year 2008. In fiscal 2008 his unit was the top-selling organisation globally for Sun in terms of growth and per cent of goal achievement. (Read that and weep Larry: we've got him now!)

Seidl is described as a true channel champion and the channel is probably going to figure large in his activities. Donatelli says he has "a strong network of channel relationships [that will help] expand HP’s success.”

Before his term at Sun, Seidl was the CEO and a board member at Permabit, the archiving storage software company. He began his career at EMC, so he'll feel right at home reporting to Donatelli on the two thirds of his product set that Donatelli looks after. ®