“It is clear that there are four things that CEOs look for – profitable growth, retain and get new customers, launch products and reduce cost.

In normal trading times the question about the future of all business is based on how to retain enough profit. All of the innovation goes to underpin the ability of the CIO to deliver this.”

That is how Peter Ryan, joint EMEA MD and Enterprise Systems Group SVP describes his challenge at HP EMEA. The region that generated around $44bn in revenue in 2012.

“If you look at the market the good thing about being HP is that you can genuinely sit in front of a customer, listen to their problems and know you have the capability to address those from the device to the data center. For example, the Cloud is consumed at the device level but does that mean that users must put all their efforts into supporting every type of device on the market? We must be able to deliver an effective strategy across the whole enterprise.”

Ryan’s plan is to take market share from competitors in the EMEA region. As Japanese manufacturers establish a presence in Europe, Ryan says his established channel relationships and existing presence in many markets give him a natural advantage. “In EMEA about 70% of my business is from partners and if you are a large distributor or reseller you want the skills to be able to leverage an expertise in products. Competitors offering a variety of architectures and file or block storage solutions create complexity and cost for partners. This matters a lot in EMEA. If you must invest in different skills as you scale from low end to high end this creates pressure and for us represents an opportunity to take market share from competitors.”

The company’s big product announcements at its European conference back in December 2012 were around storage As a result of the its 3PAR acquisition the firm launched StoreServ 7000 products. By offering a single architecture across medium to enterprise class storage products HP made what it said was its most significant storage product launch for a decade.

When asked why solid state drive (SSD) doesn’t play a bigger part in the company’s storage strategy, Ryan says: “The reason we didn’t overemphasize SSDs is that customers don’t really ask for SSD, they ask for an architecture. The want to get the best performance at IO intense applications and SSD is part of the hierarchy.”

Ryan says over 9,000 people attended the HP Discover event. “That shows that HP remains relevant to huge numbers of businesses.”

Ryan shares responsibility for EMEA with the head of personal and printing systems Eric Cador. The other divisions are software and enterprise services. The structure was designed by HP CEO Meg Whitman.
“My team brings it together,” Ryan says.

This article first appeared in Focus magazine Issue 27. The digital editon is now available.