Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s worldwide head of partner sales George Hope can finally remove the additional worldwide distribution hat that he’s been juggling since his promotion last fall. This week, he announced the hiring of Simon Ewington to succeed him as the new vice-president of worldwide distribution. Ewington will report to Hope.
Switzerland-based Ewington came from HP Inc., where he served as general manager of the graphics solutions business in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) for almost three years. Before that, he was VP, channel sales EMEA at HPE, a role he took on when Hewlett Packard split into HPE and HP Inc. in 2014.
“As Simon takes over my previous role, I will work closely with him to empower distributors to further monetize and embrace as-a-service selling strategies, while helping our shared channel partners deliver superior business outcomes to customers,” Hope said in his recent blog post announcing the appointment. “His prior experience at HPE enabling the channel transformation from a transactional to an outcome-focused business and his track record of driving consistent growth make him a natural leader for our worldwide distribution business.”
Phil Soper, chief commercial officer at HPE Canada, called Ewington a “trusted and valued colleague.”
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Anurag Agrawal, founder and chief global analyst at Techaisle, noted that despite its push towards as-a-service, distribution is still important for HPE, because it still sells things like servers and Aruba networking equipment.
“I think the point here is that (they need) somebody who has some contacts, who has got some leverage in the market to be able to work with the distributors, because the distributors themselves are building their own programs to be effective players in the cloud,” Agrawal observed. “I think the success of HPE will depend upon how they equip their channel partners with this as-a-service story. I think within HPE the partners will segment into two: one that will be selling these boxes and an elementary type of as-a-service offerings to the SMB customer, and then there will be large consulting firms who would be working with the enterprise customers doing the Greenlake stuff.”
Hope confirmed this in his blog post. “As more than 80 percent of our indirect business goes through distribution, I’m confident in Simon’s ability to help drive long-term, sustainable, and profitable growth with partners — executing on HPE’s edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service vision.”
Michael O’Neil, principal analyst, InsightaaS said that maintaining that focus on distributors is key. “The distribution part and supply chain part are really important; supply chains get hugely disrupted during the pandemic and continue to be unpredictable. And having somebody focus on that is really important.”
