New HPE Aruba Channel Chief On How Partner Experience Gives Her An ‘Outside In’ View: Exclusive

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.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• … 6
• NEXT

46Shares

LEARN MORE: Network Security  | Software as a Service  | Cybersecurity 

GINA NARCISI 

Gina Narcisi is a senior editor covering the networking and telecom markets for CRN.com. Prior to joining CRN, she covered the networking, unified communications and cloud space for TechTarget. She can be reached at [email protected].

RELATED CONTENT

Lumen Technologies Enhances SASE Portfolio For Partners Selling ‘Network-Adjacent’ Services9 In 9 Months: Here Are The Cisco Acquisitions So Far In 2023NaaS Player Meter Teams With Cloudflare To Bake DNS Security In Network InfrastructureCisco Secure Networks Revenue Grows 22 Percent In ‘Milestone’ FY 23 As Record Backlog ClearsHPE Aruba Intros SSE, ZTNA Capabilities As It Looks To Command The Secure Networking Market TO TOPADVERTISEMENT
https://d90a2f10ea75831d47633c51676a9500.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-40/html/container.html

TRENDING STORIES

1. Nvidia Says New Software Will Double LLM Inference Speed On H100 GPU | CRN
2. Google Cloud CEO On AI At Goldman Sachs Event: ‘We Have A 10-Year Head Start On Any Competitor’ | CRN
3. 5 Big CrowdStrike Moves For MSPs And MSSPs | CRN
4. 9 In 9 Months: Here Are The Cisco Acquisitions So Far In 2023 | CRN
5. The 10 Biggest Tech M&A Deals Of 2023 (So Far) | CRN