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​Aussie reshuffle sees redundancies hit Hewlett Packard Enterprise

​Aussie reshuffle sees redundancies hit Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Senior server and storage leaders depart following internal restructuring.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reshuffled its management pack in Australia, resulting in the departure of senior server and storage leaders.

Sources close to ARN can confirm that Tony Smith will vacate his role as director of HPE Server Business Unit on October 31, with Paul Shaw also departing as general manager of Storage A/NZ.

Replacing Smith and Shaw specifically will be Raj Thakur, who returns to the HPE South Pacific business in a newly created position from November 1.

ARN understands that both Smith and Shaw have the opportunity to apply for a different position within the company, or exit the business through the vendor's redundancy program.

Taking on the role of director of the Data Centre and Hybrid Cloud Group (DCHC), Thakur will head up the merged Server and Storage Business Units, alongside the Data Centre Networking division of Aruba, which have been consolidated into one.

Based in Sydney, Thakur is currently vice president and general manager of Hybrid IT across Asia Pacific and Japan, having joining the vendor from IBM in April 2013.

Following the change, Steve Coad will continue to manage the Aruba business unit across Australia and New Zealand.

"We are currently implementing organisational changes that were announced in June 2016," a spokesperson for Hewlett Packard Enterprise told ARN.

Smith, who joined the company in April 2016, managed the division responsible for providing rack, tower and blade servers, including integrated systems and software-defined offerings.

Prior to SAP focused consulting roles at the Department of Defence, Smith ran the Enterprise Business Group for Lenovo across Australia and New Zealand, following its acquisition of IBM's x86 server business in September 2014.

Previously, Smith held senior management roles across channel, networking and security at IBM, having first joined Hewlett Packard in October 2001.

Meanwhile, Shaw was responsible for sales, pre-sales, channel and product management across the vendor’s storage division, a role he held since August 2014.

Having held numerous roles at the company over the past decade, Shaw previously worked as a Solution Architect at Compaq, before it’s multi-billion dollar merger with HP in 2001.

Looking ahead, ARN sources said further redundancies are planned locally at the tech giant - impacting technical services, consulting and distribution roles - as it reshuffles business divisions following consolidation at a global level.

During the past twelve months, following the vendor’s split from HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced plans for a spin-off and merger of its non-core software assets with Micro Focus in a transaction valued at approximately $US8.8 billion.

In addition, the company also revealed plans for a tax-free spin-off and merger of its Enterprise Services business with CSC, designed to create a pure-play, global IT services powerhouse.

The ripple effect locally is now being felt however, with one source telling ARN that “more job changes are in the works and more redundancies will follow".

The reshuffle follows news that Alan Hyde is to also leave his position as vice president and general manager in Australia, to be replaced by the returning Stephen Bovis as the new leader for the Enterprise Group business.

As reported by ARN, Bovis, who currently resides in Singapore as the vice president of global and enterprise sales for HPE, brings over 15 years of in-house experience to the role, having joined the company in August 2002, before heading up the Enterprise Storage and Servers division in Australia.

This story was updated on October 25 at 5:05pm.

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Tags Hewlett Packard Enterprise

More about ARNCompaqCSCDepartment of DefenceHewlett PackardHewlett Packard EnterpriseHPIBMLenovoMicro Focus

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