Longtime HPE executive moves up from his position leading channel sales to replace Dan Belanger

Paul Hunter, who has spent almost three years as a leader with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s global partner program, is taking over as the enterprise tech giant’s managing director for North America.

The Lowdown: Hunter, whose promotion was announced this week, is replacing Dan Belanger, who left HPE after more than 30 years with the company. No explanation for Belanger’s departure was given.

The Details: Hunter has played a key role in driving HPE’s ongoing transformation from a point product vendor to a solution and service provider whose reach spans from the data center to the cloud and network edge.



Central to that strategy has been HPE’s GreenLake hybrid cloud platform, which delivers cloud-like capabilities by offering solutions via an as-a-service model and allows organizations to pay for them through a subscription service. GreenLake also is foundational to HPE’s push to sell its entire portfolio as a service by 2022.



In the second quarter, HPE’s GreenLake business saw its annualized revenue run rate increase 17% to $520 million.



The company is leaning heavily on the channel to extend the reach of GreenLake in the market. HPE has more than 700 partners selling GreenLake and in June the vendor unveiled a range of enhancements to its channel program to help partners sell the platform. Hunter also was instrumental in helping partners shift from a transactional model to one that focuses more on strategic business outcomes.



Background: Hunter has been with HPE – and before that with pre-split Hewlett-Packard – since 2002, starting as a district manager with HP’s Financial Services unit. He moved up through the sales side with the PC and printer businesses before landing as the chief of staff for the CEO. He became worldwide partner sales leader in 2017.

The Buzz: “With more than 25 years of experience at the company, Paul has consistently demonstrated a keen awareness of customer needs, effective leadership skills, and the drive to push for better,” HPE Chief Sales Officer Heiko Meyer wrote in a blog post. “Most recently, he served as the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales, embracing our value of ‘partner first,’ exemplifying our culture, and helping our partners see the opportunity in our edge-to-cloud strategy.”