Women & Diversity in Channel Awards Q&A: Heather Walls, HPE UK&I channel manager

HPE’s proudest achievement, biggest challenges of 2024 and the main opportunities in the channel - Heather Walls tells all

Tomorrow night CRN will host more than 300 finalists for the annual Women & Diversity in Channel Awards.

This year Hewlett Packard Enterprise has landed nine finalists in seven categories.

Discussing what these awards mean to HPE, UK and Ireland channel manager Heather Walls opens up about how the channel plays an important part in raising awareness for diversity and inclusion.

Why do you think awards like the WDCAs matter? What would winning this award mean to your company?

Awards to champion diversity, including gender diversity, in the IT channel are vitally important to continually raise awareness, drive necessary change and celebrate success within this area.

For HPE to win an award would be great to recognise the focus, commitment and success that we’re seeing in our diversity, equality & inclusion agenda. A diverse organisation is critical for the culture, talent acquisition and innovation we strive for at HPE.

What would you say is your company’s proudest achievement over the past year?

I’m proud of the strides that HPE takes every single month. Last month alone, we had our second Community Day of Service in 2024 with 500 team members volunteering, held a full cohort intern development day and welcomed new graduates, and shone a spotlight on HPE’s Technology Renewal Centre and sustainability efforts.

With continued innovation and investment into R&D, building on our strong heritage, we saw HPE Private Cloud for AI becoming available for general sale, to accelerate AI projects from pilot to production, and we invested into HPE GreenLake Cloud with the acquisition of the hybrid cloud management and automation company, Morpheus.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

Innovations and a fast pace of change brings challenges to ensure our people are enabled and educated at pace to immediately deliver value to our partners and customers on new technologies and solutions.

A learning culture, desire to develop and comprehensive enablement programmes, which are also available to our channel partners, enables a high performing learning environment across the organisation, from delivery to sales to supporting functions.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

In 2024 we have continued to see acquisitions across the IT channel, with some organisations looking to broaden their expertise, expand their portfolio and acquire new customers.

Other organisations have chosen a strategy of narrowing their focus, to drive deep expertise and specialisation.

We have also seen lots of new entrants to the market, organisations focusing on targeted technology solutions especially in AI.

In all cases, the development of a strong strategy, with clear unique selling points, a thought leadership approach and, as the main focus, driving real business value will continue to be the biggest driver of success.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

It’s hard to answer anything other than AI as the predominant opportunity facing us all in the IT channel.

HPE created the AI Centre of Excellence more than 30 years ago and our NVIDIA Specialisation Centre, focused on Computer Vision, in 2013.

This experience, our partnerships in AI and our comprehensive AI enablement program demonstrate how HPE can support our partners to take advantage of this opportunity.

Our recently launched innovative solutions such as HPE Private Cloud for AI, a turnkey scalable and fully accelerated private cloud, gives the AI and IT teams of our partners and customers the freedom to experiment and scale.