Former Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief slips into OCSL

A couple of months after Hewlett Packard Enterprise veteran sales chief Martin Hess quit, he’s rocked up as chairman at OCSL – one of his former employer’s nearest and dearest in the channel.

London-based OCSL partners only with HPE on hardware, there are not many tech suppliers in the channel that do this, and coupled with Hess’ strong ties with OCSL MD Tim Thrower, his hire is not a surprise.

As is customary in these situations, OCSL talked up the appointment as “signalling growth ambitions” to double the services business over the next two years.

“Martin’s insight and huge industry experience in growing HP Enterprise Services division will be essential in achieving this,” said Thrower.

Hess claimed OCSL was betting its future on being a big shot in the cloud services space and wanted to be famed for its delivery - join the industry queue sir.

HPE is working with only OCSL in EMEA on a global service provider pilot to sell more managed and cloud services, which debuted last month. Three suppliers in total are involved in the programme that dangles richer rewards for those that commit more of the business to HPE.

Hess, who left HPE in January, as we exclusively revealed, spent 14 years at the firm, latterly as veep for Enterprise Services for the UK, Middle East, Africa and Israel. He claimed to have grown the business to $2.2bn.

The services practice at OCSL will not be nearly as large or challenged as HPE, which is currently making some drastic changes, with UK service delivery centres being consolidated and some work being sent offshore.

Hess previously worked at Compaq, ICL and IBM. He stated on his exec biography that he supports Bright & Hove Albion FC (somebody’s got to) and “enjoyed the ups and downs of horse ownership for several reasons". ®