Hewlett Packard Enterprise South Africa has honoured its local channel partners at its annual HPE Channel Partner Awards ceremony, recognising their achievements during a year characterised by turmoil and disruption.

Due to the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 awards ceremony was held as a virtual event for the first time ever and the theme of “Art is Life” celebrated colour, imagination and inspiration. The event was centred on “reinvention” under the new reality that was ushered in by the crisis.

HPE South Africa MD President Ntuli congratulated all the winners and runners-up in the various categories, thanking them for their tireless work and tremendous contribution to the company during a challenging time.

“There is no doubt that we’ve been through a tough 2020 and we expect the first half of 2021 to be difficult, too. However, we are encouraged by the solid partnerships that have carried us over the years and look forward to continuing these partnerships across all market segments to drive growth for HPE in South Africa,” he said.

Having identified market share growth as one of the main goals for HPE South Africa and its channel partners for the past year, Ntuli said he was encouraged by the year-on-year growth across services and storage in 2020, but added that more gains could be made.

Looking ahead, Ntuli noted that HPE will continue to operate in the “as-a-service” and hybrid cloud space, saying it was encouraging to see that partners are increasingly adopting GreenLake as a sales strategy into the South African market.

‘Cloud opportunity’

“We want to take advantage of the massive cloud opportunity that we are seeing in the South African market. As such, we are finalising our co-location investment together with some of our channel partners to drive hybrid cloud in the local market space.

“At the same time, we will also continue our investment into the growth of our traditional business — both compute and storage. We are also investing in breakthrough technologies such as high-performance computing, specifically to drive machine learning and artificial intelligence, into the low end of the market. This we see as a game changer that will make these technologies available to all customer segments.”

Ntuli announced that one of HPE South Africa’s main goals for 2021 is to see the channel drive growth in the mid-market and small and medium business (SMB) sectors. This comes off the back of significant investments made in that space by HPE South Africa, which is now looking to the channel to take the lead and assist with driving growth in that segment.

“Once again, I’d like to thank our partners for their hard work and urge them to remain focused on the criteria for success that will used to measure the best candidates for these accolades next year.”

The winners

Aruba Sales Champion of the Year — Dylan Horsten (MySky Networks)
Aruba Distinguished Engineer of the Year — Rodney Mabunda (Datacentrix)
Aruba Software Solution of the Year — Khipu Networks
Aruba Deal of the Year — MySky Networks
HPE Aruba Distributor of the Year — Duxbury
Aruba Emerging Partner of the Year — Kubyala ICT Solutions
Aruba Partner of the Year — First Technology
HPE Compute Partner of the Year — Dimension Data
HPE Storage Partner of the Year — SYSDBA
HPE Pointnext Services Partner of the Year — Datacentrix
HPE Pointnext Services Delivery Partner of the Year — Datacentrix
HPE Pointnext Services Greenlake deal of the Year — Dimension Data
HPE Distibution Product Manager of the Year — Samantha Moss (Tarsus Distribution)
HPE Hybrid IT Distributor of the Year — Tarsus Distribution
HPE Hybrid IT Distribution Business Development Manager of the Year — Margo Broers (Tarsus Distribution)
HPE Hybrid IT Business Partner of the Year — NEC XON
HPE Hybrid IT Gold Partner of the Year — Dimension Data
HPE Hybrid IT Platinum Partner of the Year — Datacentrix
HPE Hybrid IT Fastest Growing Partner of the year — SYSDBA
HPE Nimble Partner of the Year — Datacentrix
HPE Hybrid IT Partner of the year — Datacentrix