Sales and Marketing Awards 2025: Q&A with Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter?

The CRN Sales and Marketing Awards are a real opportunity to celebrate success in the channel and showcase the innovative and creative work that sales and marketing individuals and teams do within the channel ecosystem in the IT industry. The channel is at the heart of HPE‘s strategy, with our HPE Channel and Partner Ecosystem sales and marketing teams playing a key role in bringing our vision to life. These Awards offer a wonderful opportunity to recognise the achievements made and the impact Sales and Marketing teams had on business and customers.

Why did you choose to sponsor SMAs this year?

HPE and CRN have a long-standing relationship and we have worked together closely over many years across various projects and campaigns. This is a great opportunity to cement that relationship and support the new, creative and groundbreaking ways vendors, partners and distributors are taking their messages to market.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2025 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

One of the biggest challenges for the Channel in 2025 has been navigating the persistent uncertainty in the UK market. While forecasts point to rising GDP and falling inflation, the full impact of carious factors such as the evolving US government policy on the UK economy remain unclear. This ambiguity has made it harder for organisations to plan with confidence.

In response, our team has stepped up as a trusted advisor, providing key insights, helping partners understand the shifting landscape, while staying committed to innovation in AI, hybrid cloud, compute, and networking to provide cutting-edge solutions. Regardless of industry shifts and market adjustments, we will continue to make bold moves to enhance our portfolio and accelerate value for our customers and partners.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

A big trend we’ve seen in the channel throughout the past year is consolidation and diversification.

Partners are looking on expanding their capabilities, diversifying their portfolio and specialised expertise. This has fuelled merger and acquisition activities in the market with a strong focus on managed services. And there is good reason for this: In an in-depth worldwide study from Canalys that quantifies the profit potential for partners we found that partners who position themselves as trusted advisors and who offer a breadth of services throughout the customer lifecycle can earn significantly more for every technology sold.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

One of the biggest market opportunities today, top of mind for partners and customers alike, is artificial intelligence (AI). AI continues to be the most disruptive workload for companies, and HPE has been aligning its portfolio to capitalise on this trend. As we expand our product and solutions portfolio to address this shift, it will be important that our partners continue to invest in their knowledge and skills so they are prepared to deliver the innovative technology customers demand for hybrid AI, cloud, compute, storage and networking.

This article is sponsored by HPE.