Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada’s new president Mike Hilton says the Canadian channel is rife with opportunities as he takes over for his predecessor Paula Hodgins.
The technology vendor itself is following through on its promise to enhance its cloud platform GreenLake into a full-scale cloud services market, and Hilton says the economic uncertainty of 2020 didn’t stop Canada from becoming a burgeoning cloud market. Customers want to work with an interface and other services on-prem that are as flexible as public cloud offerings. Partners that have deployed GreenLake services for customers have also helped usher in minor culture shifts towards agile development.
Looking back at his time with Microsoft where he was the regional director of intelligent cloud and AI, Hilton says the tech giant’s transformation at the time led to many lessons learned as he transitioned over to HPE.
“Getting away from just selling software and leaving customers to their own devices, to becoming a service provider…that was a significant transformation,” Hilton told Channel Daily News.
The second shift for Microsoft was betting on Azure.
HPE is doing something similar with GreenLake. Businesses are better understanding what belongs in the public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and what’s appropriate for the local data centre, explains Hilton. Partners that have deployed GreenLake services for customers have also helped usher in minor culture shifts towards agile development.
Traction was slow at first, but over the past year especially, GreenLake interest has exploded, Hilton says. He expects similar success this year for HPE’s new hybrid cloud, pay-as-you-go option for deploying Kubernetes anywhere called Ezmeral.