HPE Hires Microsoft Veteran to Lead HPE GreenLake Business Unit

HPE has tapped Microsoft veteran Keith White to head its GreenLake business unit. White, the new general manager and senior VP of GreenLake at HPE, will report to Phil Davis, president of hybrid IT for HPE, the company announced Monday.

White’s most recent position, during his more than 16 years at Microsoft, was as vice president, intelligent cloud, worldwide commercial business, where he was responsible for revenue and scorecard as well as all field, sales, partner, and go-to-market efforts for two of Microsoft’s commercial areas – applications & infrastructure, and data & AI. He held this position for the about two-and-a-half years. 

HPE’s Keith White

White’s other recent posts at Microsoft included general manager, cloud + enterprise, field and business strategy, general manager, worldwide public sector marketing, and general manager information worker lead, U.S. 

“As we transform to become the premier edge-to-cloud platform-as-a-service company, Keith’s role is fundamental to ensuring HPE continues to deliver a seamless cloud experience for our customers’ and partners’ workloads, at the edge, across all of their clouds, and in the data center,” Davis wrote in a blog. 

Just last week, HPE announced HPE GreenLake Central, an as-a-service portal and operations console from where customers can manage and run their entire hybrid IT estate. The vendor called it the next generation of GreenLake. At that time, Flynn Maloy, vice president strategy and marketing for HPE GreenLake, told Channel Futures that “HPE GreenLake Central is the last puzzle piece to truly offer a modern cloud level experience for your on-prem, single tenant environment.” 

Although HPE GreenLake Central is initially available via HPE direct sales only, the vendor is working on tooling that will enable the company to offer it to its indirect channel. 

HPE GreenLake has picked up steam with partners after the vendor’s third crack at getting it right took hold. The supplier reported, in June, that GreenLake is now the fastest-growing business at HPE, with over $2.8 billion in total contract value and over 600 customers. At the same time, HPE announced it would offer its entire portfolio through a range of subscription, pay-per-use and consumption-driven offerings by 2022, and has extended HPE GreenLake with midmarket offers. 

Since that time, HPE reports that GreenLake has more than 740 customers, worldwide, including 160 new wins this year. The channel has generated over 200% order growth this year.