Networking News
New HPE Aruba Channel Chief On How Partner Experience Gives Her An ‘Outside In’ View: Exclusive
Gina Narcisi
‘I think a part of me always wants to look at a subject area and opportunity with this view of what if we did things this way? What if we looked at this as an opportunity for us to grow and learn and change? [Now], I’m bringing that sales side into the Aruba channel because I have the view from the trenches. I’ve been with the customers and clients and the partners over the past four years so I can bring some of that knowledge to the worldwide team and maybe support them in looking at things a bit different,’ says HPE Aruba’s newly crowned channel chief, Lene Skov.
HPE Aruba Networking in June crowned a new global channel chief.
Lene Skov, HPE Aruba’s regional director for northern Europe for the last four years, was named vice president of worldwide channels following the retirement of worldwide channel chief, Donna Grothjan. And Skov, for her part, has big plans for partners.
Skov has channel in her blood. Not only does she have more than nine years of experience at HP, and later HPE and HPE Aruba collectively, she’s worked for a number of software companies and even had a two-and-half year stint at a channel partner organization that just so happened to be one of HPE’s largest solution provider partners in Denmark. That valuable channel experience, she said, gave her the experience of looking at business from a partner perspective and exposed her to the challenges and opportunities that face the solution provider community.
Now firmly in the global channel chief seat, Skov has been listening to partners for the last 12 weeks. Her “North Star,” she said, will revolve around bringing a renewed sales focus to the channel team to arm partners with the resources they need and the support from the company as they go after emerging market opportunities around things like Networking as a Service, SD-WAN and security-minded networking deals.
She sat down with CRN to share her vision for the channel, the things that partners can expect to stay the same, and how she’ll harness her experience to help partners go after what she sees as the biggest areas of opportunity that exist today. Here are excerpts from the conversation.
