Chris Champagne was named the new channel chief for HP Canada’s Enterprise Group this morning.
Champagne will have the title of vice president of partners and channels at HP Canada replacing Andrew Eppich who is taking another role in the company.
The promotion of Champagne was necessitated by the departure of Eppich as channel chief. Champagne will report directly to Charlie Atkinson starting October 1st, 2014. Champagne has had a fast rise since joining HP Canada after the company acquired 3PAR back in 2010.
According to sources, the 3PAR business has outperformed company expectations in Canada. Champagne was the channel business development manager for HP Canada’s storage unit that included the 3PAR technology. Champagne has more than 24 years of IT experience in distribution and the reseller community. He was also an entrepreneur in high tech.
Previous to HP/3PAR, Champagne was at Tech Data Canada where he held various positions such as field sales manager, field sales account executive and inside sales manager. Champagne also worked for CDN Top 100 Solution Provider OnX Enterprise Solutions as part of its managed services team.
Champagne will be one of two company channel chiefs; the other is Gary Drysdale, the channel chief for HP Canada’s Printing and Personal Systems Group.
Inside sources at HP Canada have told CDN that Eppich’s new role will be announced shortly. Eppich’s departure at enterprise channel chief was met with surprise by the channel community in Canada. Eppich was considered a rising star in the organization. He was awarded the HP Channel Manager of the Year award for the Americas region and channel sales in the Enterprise group did increase under Eppich’s watch.
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The news of Champagne’s promotion comes at a time when HP acquired cloud platform provider Eucalyptus Systems Inc., of Goleta, Calif., to back the company’s OpenStack cloud strategy. It also comes when HP revamped its lineup of desktop and mobile workstations to compete with Apple’s Mac platform.
The company’s new Z desktops and ZBook mobile workstations were announced recently at its Fort Collins, Colo., facility and are designed to address the constraints brought about by increasing compute-heavy tasks in industries such as graphics design, digital imaging, architecture, manufacturing, finance, media and entertainment, oil and gas exploration and healthcare.