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HPE EMEA boss confirms shuffling of exec deck

Round holes, square pegs... or something like that

HPE GPC '16 Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s latest EMEA chief has lined up his generals and the divisions they will run from the start of the new fiscal year beginning November.

Andy Isherwood, who replaced Peter Ryan as senior veep for the Enterprise Group and MD for EMEA in July, is preparing for life after Enterprise Services and the Software division.

He said David Chalmers, HPE’s EMEA chief technologist and veep, who runs the pre-sales and technology group will head up an expanded unit that also includes business development and “enablement solutions”.

“What we’ve done is pull together all of this capability to try to build more repeatable solutions… and we’ll have an end-to-end process of working out what we do in specific markets and how we package that.”

Iain Stephen, EMEA veep and GM for servers will run a data centre and hybrid cloud group, which will draw upon the hardware and couple it with software defined products.

“[We are trying] to nurture new growth opportunities. I don’t think incubation is something we’ve done very well at HPE, we create lots of great stuff but we don’t create markets quick enough and we don’t tap into those profit pools as quickly as we can,” said Isherwood.

The third group will concern industry verticals, “building out IP around some of our solutions”, drawing upon alliances with other vendors and HPE’s inside sales team. The leader will be confirmed next week.

Finally, the EMEA channel, SMB and Service Provider division will be run by Carlo Giorgi, currently veep and GM for EMEA storage at HPE. He also has worked on corporate strategy with former EMEA MD Ryan.

This means that after five years as channel overlord, Gilles Thiebaut will be moving on to an as yet unconfirmed new pasture within the company. We are told his next role will be confirmed by the middle of next week.

HPE has sold its ES business to CSC and the Software wing to Micro Focus, leaving the Enterprise Group and Financial Services as the last divisions at the company, turning over circa $30bn.

Five years ago when CEO Meg Whitman grabbed the controls, HPE’s revenues were $110bn, but the split with HP's PC and printer busines, the other “divestitures” and a sales declines changed all of that.

Isherwood said his employer was going from an “unhealthy balance sheet” prior to the sales, to a “very, very strong balance sheet with $5bn net cash” that will swell to “$10bn” by the end of next year.

“We will have a big bank of money to hopefully allow us to do things moving forward.”

“[It was] interesting being big but we need to make sure we are relevant,” he said, “make sure we really focus on what we’re good at… because we are smaller we’ve got to be quicker to take share and seize the opportunities in the market”. ®

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