HPE Hires Superstar CIO Mac Avancena As GreenLake VP

‘This role synthesizes everything I love about being a CIO and business partner: the art of the possible discovering IT’s value with customers; alignment of strategy to actionable, measurable, and repeatable results; and, application of digital transformation,’ says new Vice President of GreenLake as a Service Solutions Mac Avencena in a LinkedIn post.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has hired as-a-service savvy CIO Mac Avancena, Jr., who two years ago put in place a blockbuster HPE GreenLake on-premises cloud services deal for Kern County, California, as its new vice president of GreenLake-as-a-Service Solutions.

“This role synthesizes everything I love about being a CIO and business partner: the art of the possible discovering IT’s value with customers; alignment of strategy to actionable, measurable, and repeatable results; and, application of digital transformation,” said the superstar CIO in a LinkedIn post Monday. “Public service reinforced resilience in leaning into your core mission to help one another. I am grateful for the opportunity to extend my work passion and mission with HPE in this exciting role!”

Avancena, who spent nearly four years as Kern County CIO, is reporting to Alexia Clements, HPE’s Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Go To Market for HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. She oversees the $2 billion global sales effort and go-to-market enablement and programs.

Before taking on the CIO job at Kern County, Avancena spent 16 years in various IT roles at NBC Universal including director of infrastructure technology and senior director of product management.

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The new hire brought a wave of high fives on LinkedIn from partners and industry executives including top GreenLake partner, Nth Generation Systems, the San Diego, Calif. HPE Platinum partner which had closed the GreenLake deal with Kern County, California.

Dan Molina, co-president and chief technology officer for Nth Generation, told CRN that Avancena’s appointment is a big win for HPE and its channel partners.

“This is an excellent move by HPE,” he said, noting that Nth Generation has used the Kern County deal as a prototype for other successful GreenLake implementations. “Mac is a true technology visionary and leader who cares about making businesses and government as efficient as possible by leveraging the power of partnerships. As the CIO of Kern County, the third largest county in California, Mac worked with Nth Generation to implement GreenLake and was able to witness first hand the business outcome benefits of GreenLake.”

The GreenLake Kern County implementation ultimately delivered cost savings and productivity benefits in a streamlined agile cloud services operations model, said Molina. “Mac’s vision was to make sure that infrastructure was highly available and secure,” he said.

Avancena’s first-hand experience with GreenLake is sure to help partners drive GreenLake sales growth, said Molina. “There is nothing better than hearing directly from a key leader who actually implemented GreenLake,” said Molina. “Organizations considering going to an as a service on premises model are going to be pleased to talk to someone who has seen and enjoyed the financial and productivity benefits of GreenLake.”

Before inking the GreenLake deal, Nth Generation had worked with Kern County to deliver improved security services for the county. In addition, Nth Generation provides the county virtual chief information security officer services.

“We were already a trusted advisor with Mac before the GreenLake deal,” said Molina. “He worked with us in a true partnership. That is what makes Mac such a great leader. He saw the value in partnership. Mac was very focused on delivering business outcomes to the county with a platform would provide agility so if things changed he would be able to respond as fast as possible. He understood the value of GreenLake.”

Avancena’s technology vision with regard to IT agility proved to be prescient as GreenLake was key to helping Kern County quickly move to a work at home IT environment for county employees with VDI capabilities provided through GreenLake.

The four-year, multimillion dollar Kern County, California GreenLake deal resulted in a whopping 42 percent reduction in storage costs, Avancena told CRN in 2020.

Besides the cost savings, HPE’s game changing edge to cloud platform as a service provided Kern County with 63 percent additional storage capacity as a result of implementing a next-generation hyperconverged tiered GreenLake storage solution, said Avancena, the driving force behind the Kern County’s IT makeover.

“These are hard dollars that we saved,” said Avancena, who was grappling with storage costs that were rising at a 40 percent annual clip before moving to the HPE GreenLake on pemise cloud pay-per-use service, told CRN.“Part of the reason we were able to do this is because we finally put some guardrails around our consumption.”

Nth Generation expects its GreenLake sales to be up by as much as 50 percent in 2022, said Molina. “The GreenLake pipeline continues to build,” he said. “We are very excited about the latest announcements. HPE continues to integrate more innovative technology into GreenLake including Aruba Central. We are super excited about the GreenLake opportunity.”