Sue Preston, vice president and general manager - HPE Pointnext and HPE GreenLake, UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Ltd

What has been your path to power?

I started my career as an apprentice at an IT Recruitment company, which led to a permanent role supporting a number of sales managers with interviewing and placing technical programmers. I had a fantastic mentor and leader that believed in me and gave me the opportunity to take on a full-time sales role at the age of 18 - igniting my passion for technology and sales and starting my 30 year career in technology leadership and transformation.  

Throughout my career I’ve held leadership roles in the partner ecosystem in the Unix arena and ERP transformation. I spent eight years at Hitachi driving global financial services and managed services teams along with driving transformation and focus on the internet of things, as well as two years at Microsoft running the Azure and data AI specialist teams in the UK across enterprise, commercial and public sector.

I am currently the vice president and general manager of HPE Pointnext and HPE GreenLake for UK, Ireland, Middle East and South Africa, covering software, services and consumption. I was previously shortlisted for CRN Exec Mentor of the Year and was appointed on the TechUK Board, the national trade association for the UK’s technology industries.