HP's Bovis appointed APJ VP of servers

HP has appointed Stephen Bovis to the position of vice-president and general manager of industry standard servers in Asia-Pacific and Japan.

Bovis has been with HP for over 12 years, and for the previous three years was responsible for the enterprise storage and servers (ESS) business in the South Pacific. He officially began his new role this week from Australia, but will be relocating to Singapore with his family over the next couple of months.

Bovis told ARN the new position presents an opportunity for him to apply the successes in the Australian channel across other countries in the region.

“And likewise to look at things other countries have done and see whether or not there are good opportunities for us to continue to develop the Australian channel using those practices from elsewhere in the region, or even in Europe or the Americas,” he said.

“Australia is today the third or fourth largest subsidiary across the region, contributing somewhere between 15-16 per cent of the business, so Australia will still be a very important country for me in my new role.”

As vice-president, Bovis will be tasked with extending HP’s position in the blade server and virtualisation market across Asia-Pacific and Japan, as well as driving growth in the x86 business. He will report to fellow Australian, Tony Parkinson, who heads up the ESS business in the region.

“My first priority is to get a really crisp understanding of each country, how they operate, what their challenges are and from there start to look to build plans to allow us to continue to grow our market leadership position with the portfolio I will be looking after,” Bovis said.

“Extending market coverage is the greatest priority that we have, and ultimately that lends itself to us having a very strong channel across the region. We’ve made a number of investments in terms of pre-sales skilling and sales skilling, and we need to continue that. Ultimately, what we’ve got to have for the channel is very well aligned rebate structures, reward programs and marketing activities, particularly in this climate.”