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HPE UKIMEA channel director on AI, GreenLake and sustainability

Charlie Tunley breaks down what’s driving growth and how AI is influencing HPE’s channel business

HPE's business is growing from three different angles and plans to tap into these opportunities through more specialised teams.

That is according to HPE UK&I and MEA channel & partner ecosystem director, Charlie Tunley, who recently sat down with CRN.

In its latest quarterly results, HPE delivered revenue growth of three per cent to $7.2bn in Q2 2024, with AI systems revenue more than doubling from the prior quarter.

Breaking down what he sees as the key areas primed for growth this year, Tunley lists a trio of drivers.

"The first is in artificial intelligence, the adoption of which is hugely exciting for our customers, our partners and for HPE. It presents a huge opportunity for our industry.

"The second is on the HPE GreenLake cloud platform, which we continue to invest in. We continue to add new services, and everything that we do is integrated into the GreenLake cloud platform so our customers and partners have a single experience when working with HPE."

AI's influence on the channel

"Our channel partners are trying to understand what their role is, what's their value, and specifically in the world of enterprise AI, which is brand new and emerging," Tunley says.

"They are coming to us for advice on how we can support them.

"We are supporting our partners with things like incubation programmes for AI. So we are upskilling, we're working with our partners and some of the organisations that you would consider to be very relevant in the field of AI.

"We're connecting the dots between them, ourselves and our key points of differentiation and our channel partners to help them navigate this brand new but incredibly exciting part of our industry."

The third growth area? Sustainability

"The third key growth area is around sustainability."

Tunley says the topic is a huge requirement for customers of all different verticals and sizes, with many board level individuals within customers having sustainability requirements and metrics in their goals.

"Our partners have the same thing. When they're responding to tenders, they're being asked to showcase their sustainability credentials."

Moreover, sustainability has quickly become one of the most asked about topics by HPE channel partners.

"It's in every RFP response. We're getting lots of inquiries, interests and activity around sustainability," Tunley says.

"We also get a lot of questions day-to-day on how our technical community can engage with us in a more coherent way.

"How can they get access to collateral and information? We're unique at HP where we give our partners access to exactly the same information that we give our internal teams.

"If you're an HPE partner you get the same access to information as if you're an HP badged employee through things like HP Sales Pro, and Tech Pro, depending on your role."

HPE's green services

Flipping the script on what HPE is doing for the environment, Tunley references the vendor's Scottish recycling centre for asset upcycling and recycling.

"We offer things like a circular economy report to our customers based on the utilisation of their hardware assets, which we do in conjunction with our partners.

"So what we are doing is we're not trying to be the heroes that have the answer to everything. We're trying to augment our partners capability. And I think we've got a really strong message around assets, but also things like circular economy reporting as well."

Growth plans for UK&I

Now Tunley has identified the areas ready to supercharge their growth, he outlines how HPE will capture these opportunities.

"Our growth plans are focused around being more acquisitive, taking more market share, but doing that by winning with our partners.

"So our focus is on being a great organisation for our partners to work with, having great technology, solutions and services to offer and go-to-market jointly with our partners to win more market share and be acquisitive.

"We are doing this by increased specialisation and what we mean by that is by having more sales specialists focused on their own individual area of expertise.

"They can be more competitive and win more opportunities because they have more specialised content, which is more focused on their domain of expertise. So that could be AI, cloud or data services."