When, in the very first days of 2023, Alfredo Yépez landed in Madrid as the new general director of the Spanish subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and of the region that includes Portugal, Greece, Italy and Israel, he surprised everyone and everyone. One of the reasons: with the unexpected appointment, the scope of the responsibilities that he has exercised for ten years from Miami and now assumes from Madrid, in charge of the Latin American markets, was expanded. Does it make sense as an operating model, which is not unusual among American IT companies? Does it work in practice?
A year later, Yépez (Caracas, 1967) responded affirmatively and explained his answer. “In the company's vision, the European markets have more elements in common than the United States with Latin America, until now included in the aggregate America, in which the American business prevails. To begin with, the United States is a single market; Europe and Latin America are geographically fragmented, with countries of different sizes and quite similar coverage.” As markets, Italy or Spain have similarities with Mexico or Brazil, while Greece roughly coincides with Colombia or Peru. “Both regions share their good practices: in fact, our support center in Barcelona serves European and Mediterranean countries.”
From a Spanish perspective, Yépez points out that it would be difficult for him to find any Ibex 35 company that does not make a significant turnover in Latin America. Reciprocally, "in the geography for which I am responsible, the percentage that Spain represents is 40% and, once the other Europeans are discounted, 60% is distributed among a dozen Latin American markets." He emphasizes that the expansion of GreenLake, as HPE calls the pay-per-use or subscription formula of its product and service offering, has been favored by the decision: of the 27,000 clients that have adopted it in the world, some 1,600 contracts They originate in southern Europe and Latin America. In other words, it works, he confirms: “The total value of GreenLake contracts in HPE's results was $13 billion at the end of the last fiscal year, with recurring revenues of $1.3 billion in the fourth quarter.”
As in any conversation with HPE, references to the hybrid cloud and GreenLake punctuate the interview with Yépez, senior vice president of the company. “Our performance is compensated based on two criteria: annualized recurring revenue and the number of new logos captured. In Spain, a quarter of new customers in 2023 had no relationship with HPE and now buy from us in an as-a-service format. Now, all of our products are available under GreenLake, but GreenLake is not suitable for all customers. “Some are not going to migrate to this formula due to their size, while the little ones may not be interested.”
He modulates the message when talking about the rise of cloud services in recent years: HPE has been an early supporter of hybridity. “What customers are looking for in the cloud model is an experience, not necessarily getting rid of their data centers. For two reasons: control and sovereignty over your data, combined with the flexibility to manage your own infrastructure.”
Regarding the behavior of the Spanish market, he considers the case of public administrations to be symptomatic. At first, the cloud stumbled upon explainable habits and prejudices, but that barrier has been broken. "Public administrations, like any other client, have the option of purchasing in either of the two modalities, this is our asset."
