HPE hires Dell Technologies veteran to lead storage business

The changing of the storage guard at HPE comes as the edge-to-cloud services provider moves to drive market-share gains against the likes of Dell Technologies, Pure Storage and NetApp.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has hired a former 14-year Dell Technologies veteran, Jim O'Dorisio (pictured), as senior vice president and general manager of its $4.4bn storage business.

O'Dorisio, whose most recent position was senior vice president and general manager at information management provider Iron Mountain, started in the new position three weeks ago.

Before joining Iron Mountain in January 2018 and departing in December 2020, O'Dorisio was vice president and COO of business and technology operations for Dell Technologies.

O'Dorisio reports to HPE executive vice president and general manager of hybrid cloud Fidelma Russo.

Russo worked with O'Dorisio at both Iron Mountain where she was CTO and executive vice president of global technology & operations from May 2017 to May 2020 and at Dell Technologies where she was senior vice president and general manager of the enterprise storage business from January 2011 to January 2017.

Among O'Dorisio's positions at Dell Technologies was COO of the backup and recovery systems division, vice president and product management in the storage business and general manager and vice president of the backup software group.

O'Dorisio replaces Tom Black, who was executive vice president and general manager of the storage business for three years until he was moved to a position as executive vice president and general manager of private cloud for HPE GreenLake.

HPE's storage business in the most recent quarter was down 13 per cent to $1.1bn with an 8.1 per cent operating profit margin compared to 15.4 per cent for the prior year period.

The changing of the storage guard at HPE comes as the edge to cloud services provider moves to drive market-share gains against the likes of Dell Technologies, Pure Storage and NetApp in the core storage business now that the supply chain crisis is over.

HPE is, in fact, investing in storage and compute specialty resources even as it eliminated last year a number of general sales roles in North America, including some territory account managers, enterprise account managers and partner business managers.

"All of HPE's major competitors have significantly increased their investment in the channel to grow storage market share," said C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, a Fulcrum IT Partners company and a top HPE partner. "HPE needs to step up quickly with more investment into the channel to drive storage gains in a very competitive market. Dell has done a great job partnering with us to drive market share gains in the storage business."

Russo last October told Wall Street analysts that HPE is "poised" to gain storage market share as a result of its Alletra storage product leadership position and new go-to-market investments.

"Since its launch, HPE Alletra has seen the fastest customer adoption of any storage platform in HPE history," said Russo in her first public comments since being named, effective last 1 November, as the head of the HPE hybrid cloud business unit, which now includes storage.

"In addition to our product leadership, we are also increasing investments in our go to market, both in our direct sales force and in the channel, and with these investments we are poised to take share from our competitors."

Russo said she sees the opportunity to gain share from not just traditional storage competitors but also public cloud providers.

"We have got about a 10 per cent market share within storage," she said.

"We have got a lot of runway to go, and we are very confident about the cloud-enabled and the platform-based attractiveness of the architecture for our customers. We see this not just against traditional players but also with customers who are thinking about, ‘Should I put my data in the public cloud or should I put my data on-prem?' With AI being more top-of-mind for storage buyers, we are seeing more and more conversations [with customers] about how do they expand their storage footprint on-prem."