C O V E R S T O RY deals are really big and could be truly game-changing. With every new customer conversation, GreenLake has become a door-opener. I’m expecting it to be a big factor in the second half of the year with customers conserving capital and protecting the balance sheet. In tough economic times, you protect the balance sheet. That’s what GreenLake does—it allows you to still be able to provide services while protecting the balance sheet.” HPE’s pandemic relief efforts have also provided partners with much-needed additional financial liquidity in the midst of the crisis. IT Partners’ customers in late March/early April began delaying payments, said Tepedino. “Without HPE backstopping distribution it would have been really difficult to keep the supply chain going,” he said. “Distribution is where the credit comes from, so between HPE and Tech Data we were able to continue to navigate the pandemic.” HPE putting “liquidity back into the channel” with extended terms is comparable to the Federal Reserve taking action to stimulate the U.S. economy, Tepedino said. “We absolutely need that liquidity to keep moving on,” he said. “We haven’t had to use too much of it, but the fact that it is there is important. ... It has to be in place to prevent order loss. You sleep well knowing it is there.” One of the big benefits of working with HPE is its strong channel leadership in every part of the organization, including HPE Worldwide Head of Partner Sales Paul Hunter; North America Channel Chief Leslie Maher; HPE Senior Vice President and Managing Director, North America Dan Belanger; U.S. Enterprise East Vice President and General Manager Terry Richardson; Vice President and Managing Director of Global and Enterprise Accounts Peter Brennan; and HPE North America Senior Sales Director Marc Sarazin, said Tepedino. “These are channel stalwarts, longtime friends to the channel,” he said. “It’s great when you have the entire organization behind the channel.” Case in point: IT Partners’ ability to close a blockbuster HPE Superdome high-performance supercomputer deal with a major credit card processing company in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. That deal is helping the financial services player process 30 million-plus transactions a day, a big boost to the small and medium businesses across America relying even more on credit card transactions during the pandemic. “We are a big part of keeping that infrastructure rolling,” said Tepedino, noting that it’s not the type of business that is for the faint of heart. “When you are in the credit card business you can’t drop a single transaction, a single bit of data. Superdome is simply rock-solid, so we could support the heavy volume of transactions and the absolute highest level of availability in the industry. There aren’t many infrastructure products that you can say will have zero mistakes. That is what Superdome delivers,” he said. Tepedino credited Sarazin and his team with helping IT Partners close the deal. “Marc understands the customer, the
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deal and the channel,” he said. “That’s powerful stuff. The HPE partnership was critically important to getting that deal done. Nobody wins a big deal alone. You win it because you have a strong partnership.”
HPE’s Intelligent Edge Advantage It has been five years since HPE acquired Aruba Networks, a deal that was architected by Neri, who at the time was heading up HPE’s enterprise compute business. That acquisition has been critical to the reinvention of HPE, a defining moment that paved the way for the company’s edge-to-cloud Platformas-a-Service strategy. “HPE was the first to actually declare that there is an opportunity at the edge, so we built an organization called Intelligent Edge,” said Keerti Melkote, Aruba founder and president of HPE’s Intelligent Edge business. “Antonio called it first from a vision standpoint. Now I see AT&T and Microsoft [each] have an intelligent edge organization. AWS is talking about intelligent edge. The industry is validating that vision Antonio had.” Ultimately, Neri has reignited the HPE innovation engine, focusing the company and its employees on what’s possible in the future, said Melkote. That has resulted in an edge-tocloud Platform-as-a-Service strategy that is focused sharply on where customers need to go to be successful, not where they have been. At the same time, Neri has focused HPE squarely on innovating—one of the original hallmarks of the Silicon Valley jewel. He has also restored the Hewlett-Packard culture of trust and respect for individuals and being a force for good, a central doctrine of Neri’s leadership philosophy. Those cultural tenets from HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard have struck a chord with HPE employees, said Melkote. “There has been a fantastic congruence of forces within the company,” he said. “That has really given us a lot of energy to move forward with confidence.” As Neri has moved HPE into position to capitalize on fastgrowing market opportunities like edge, artificial intelligence and data insight, he has at the same time been forced to grapple with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. “Obviously every CEO gets tested and every organization gets tested,” said Melkote. “The first half of 2020 has been a severe challenge for many organizations. This is where I feel organizations that are built to last will not only survive but actually do well coming out of a crisis like we have today. It was really heartening to see us as an organization under Antonio’s leadership really meet the moment.” With the coronavirus crisis taking hold, Neri moved quickly to reach out to HPE’s more than 61,000 employees worldwide, assuring them that their safety was priority No. 1 and that HPE and its employees would emerge stronger from the crisis. “Acknowledging the tough times and reassuring employees we would get through this was very meaningful,” said Melkote of Neri’s leadership.
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