HPE Africa Partner Summit and Channel Partner Awards 2024

[SiddharthGupta]

Empowering Partnerships: Highlights from the HPE Africa Partner Summit 2024

Earlier this year, we invited our partners and distributors to the HPE Africa Partner Summit. The event in Mauritius was our annual opportunity to meet face-to-face and learn about HPE’s strategy and priorities for the forthcoming year.

We welcomed 90 attendees from 35 countries, with ten engaging presentations from our experts, before celebrating our annual Channel Partner Awards, recognising exceptional performance and rising stars.

Focusing on solutions

HPE covers the African region remotely, adopting a ‘Partner Led Country’ approach, rather than working from local offices. The summit was an opportunity to gather our partners and together look at the business challenges we face, and how to address them.

With multiple acquisitions extending the HPE portfolio each year, the summit focused on our solutions, and the customer successes surrounding them. After looking at the HPE Africa Strategy with Head of Sales, Sid Gupta, Director Dave Strong explained how we translate customer outcomes to world class solutions. Dave explored how to create value through technology innovation, IT operations efficiency and operational excellence. He highlighted the importance of focusing on outcomes and helping customers navigate the new hybrid cloud and AI journeys.

“Outcomes are key – our customers expect us to understand their problems, translate those into outcomes and deliver technology solutions. HPE service is core to delivering that. We’re focused on customer experience and what that means - we’re here to help.” – Dave Strong

An AI undercurrent

AI was a key theme throughout the event, as we see a global increase in use cases and organisations harnessing the benefits across many industries.

Michael Langeveld, Technology and Business Development Lead, presented on Generative AI and how to accelerate adoption. He looked at the challenges of AI and the essential building blocks required to begin a successful AI journey, before sharing examples of how AI is being used across a range of industries including health, finance, retail and transport. Michael identified useful tools and a readiness enablement plan to help partners to engage customers on their AI journey in the most effective way.

Our turnkey solution, HPE Private Cloud AI (PCAI), was introduced as a solution to accelerate business success. With the speed and scale of public cloud alongside the security and privacy of a private environment, HPE PCAI has the potential to allow customers to fully explore the benefits of AI.

Celebrating customer success

Content was focused on customer success stories from some of our top vertical industries, with solutions centred on HPE GreenLake, providing a simple, flexible and scalable hybrid cloud environment that offers agility for many organisations. There was plenty of opportunities to learn more about HPE’s extensive portfolio and see real world problems being solved with an HPE solution. Success stories were collected from Telco, finance, oil & gas, public sector and manufacturing industries, demonstrating the vast range of customers who are harnessing the benefits of HPE solutions. This gave our partners an excellent overview of the real value that HPE solutions have in solving customers’ problems.

Recognition for our partners

A key element of the summit was the Africa Channel Partner Awards, presenting around 30 partners with our coveted trophies. Awards recognised our ‘Distributor of the Year’, as well as our ‘Reseller of the Year’ across many categories, including Aruba, Storage, Compute and Services. The awards also recognised top performers in sales and solution management, as well as rising stars across most categories.

“A massive thank you to our incredible team, partners, sales, technical team, and clients for their continued support. Together, we are setting new benchmarks in the tech industry!” – MC3 – winners of Distributor of the Year – HPE Africa, Distributor of the Year - Aruba Networking, Best Transactional Business Performance

“Looking forward to continued success together, this is just a beginning of many more!” – Red Dot Distribution – winners of Distributor Rising Star & HPE Co-Marketing Performance.

“This recognition marks a significant milestone for us and reflects our unwavering commitment to providing innovative solutions and turning our customers' challenges into successes.” – CIS – winners of Reseller of the Year – Compute, Reseller of the Year - Services

A chance to dance

No African Partner Summit is complete without breaking out the dancing shoes, and we celebrated in true African style. A DJ, live band, dancing, great food, fire dancers and entertainment on the beach provided an incredible opportunity to relax, get to know each other better and celebrate all that our partners have achieved. It was the perfect culmination of our Partner Summit, bringing together partners from across Africa and the wider region, dedicating time to enjoy the African hospitality and culture.

“This was an important event to connect to partners and distributors to ensure that we deliver best in class technology services across Africa” – Ahmad Alkhallafi - Managing Director United Arab Emirates and Africa

“It’s been an incredible event. Our partners are engaged, energised, and keen to partner with us and drive success in our storage and data service business and we’re excited to work with them.” – Paul Atkins - UKIMEA Storage & Data Services Director

You can watch the event summary here

Siddharth Gupta
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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