As part of our series getting to know the team behind HPE OEM Solutions, today we’re catching up with Paul Santilli, who’s responsible for Worldwide OEM Industry Intelligence & Strategy.
Paul, tell us a bit more about your role.
I’ve been with HPE for 25 years and still really enjoy the challenges and successes. The OEM Solutions team has a great entrepreneurial spirit and that challenges us to push the boundaries of opportunities to grow our business and expand our offerings. Our passion for customer, solution and overall HPE experience is something I’ve never seen in any of my other roles or companies that I’ve worked in.
Do any particular highlights stand out?
Every day that I hear about or see a satisfied customer is another highlight moment. Thankfully, there have been many over the years. There have also been lowlights though, which I see as keeping me from falling into a false sense of security. They further challenge me to break through additional barriers and achieve greater customer success outcomes.
What did you do before you joined HPE?
I’ve worked in high-tech all my life, including ten years at Apple in various quality, manufacturing and distribution roles and ending up managing new product introduction for the manufacturing organization. Prior to that, I spent around seven years in chip manufacturing roles around ASIC and microprocessor design and manufacturing.
What keeps you busy outside of work?
A lot of things! I’d say family, hobbies (I love to cook, for example), business activities, intelligence organizations, fitness (I’m kind of a gym rat), and God—although not necessarily in that order!
And what are you looking forward to doing once life returns to normal a bit more?
Practising my constitutional rights in an unabated manner, and getting to go anywhere outside my front door!
It would be great to get your take on some of the current trends in the industry, Paul. What do you see as being the main opportunities available to OEMs right now?
We’re in a time of great opportunities for OEMs in our business. Never before in my professional career have I observed such a convergence of technology, data and human ingenuity focused on achieving successes that could only be dreamed of a few years ago. We and our OEM partners are better able to develop solutions not only for specific industry challenges and needs, but also for transformational use cases that can help change the world and improve lives. This means going beyond traditional corporate objectives. We’re going from just selling products and solutions to improving experiences, promoting socio-economic advancements, and enhancing quality of life. These are the objectives that future business growth should be built on.
What are the hurdles we need to overcome?
High-magnitude perpetual disruption can always be impactful, and the Covid-19 pandemic has certainly shown the world just how unprepared we are for global challenges. I’ve proposed that there are three states of organizational response to disruption that we’ve seen during the pandemic:
- Amplification of the strengths and weaknesses of a company, especially around digital transformation
- Acceleration of the trajectory of a company’s business value proposition
- Augmentation that organizations need in order to pivot their internal processes and enhance their product and services portfolio so they’re better equipped to satisfy newly shaped customer demands.
Our OEM channel partners need to accurately shift their business requirements in response to these challenges, while HPE OEM must adapt and modify our capabilities in order to quickly reset towards satisfying our OEM demands. A great example of this is our transformation as a company towards as-a-Service with HPE GreenLake, which provides an industry-leading customer-centric alternative for addressing future hybrid cloud challenges.
And what are your main focus areas for the coming year?
I can summarize this in three areas: customer, customer, and customer!
Lastly, what excites you about the HPE OEM Solutions’ offering to the market? What do you think makes it stand out from the competition?
There are many areas of HPE OEM Solutions that uniquely position us to be the solutions provider of choice to our OEM partners. They include our 4-S ecosystem:
- Proficiency and expert capabilities in providing world-class Solutions
- Dedicated solution Specialists
- A globally connected infrastructure around Supply Chain
- A vast network of 24 x 7 ready Services.
Then there’s also the fact that we offer the industry’s most secure server technology, and Virtual OEM channel support capabilities. In support of our company overall direction, we’re also providing as-a-Service HPE GreenLake-based offerings to our OEM clients. We offer hundreds of proven industry configurations to thousands of highly satisfied clients that have impacted millions of people around the globe.
Nabanita Maji
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
twitter.com/hpe_partner
LinkedIn/groups/6988995/
hpe.com/us/en/solutions/OEM
Nabanita1
OEM Solutions team