Security company Infoblox, whose mission is to make network infrastructure more agile, automated, scalable and secure, has named former HPE channel leader George Hope as vice president of Americas partner sales.

Hope left HPE in February after nine years at that firm. He was instrumental in building out cloud services sales growth for HPE GreenLake. Chris Millerick, vice president, global partner sales and alliances at Infoblox, said Hope’s leadership, experience and strong relationships across the partner ecosystem span enterprise, commercial and SMB market segments.

Infoblox’s Chris Millerick

“[Hope] will serve Infoblox and our partners incredibly well as we work to drive growth and collaboration together,” Millerick said. “As we look to build new relationships and help our trusted partners deliver custom solutions to complex networking and security challenges, George’s leadership perspectives and successful experience will help us engage the partner community, by showcasing Infoblox’s tremendous value across the Americas.”

However, getting there means setting priorities.

Infoblox’s George Hope

“We will start to work with partners that know us from DNS and IP management and educate them in our new capabilities, the new branding, what we do around security and how they can take advantage of it. It’s the best kept secret and we’d like that secret to get out,” Hope said. “I’m excited about being part of the transformation. I think if you look at Infoblox, it checks all of the boxes for me. It’s an established market leader that’s transforming with some new offerings, so they need to evangelize to get partners on board to do different things.”

Infoblox Promotes Selling Services

Hope added that Infoblox has an opportunity to scale from customers that would benefit from utilizing more of the company’s portfolio.

“It’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a transformative opportunity,” Hope said. “That’s what we were doing at HPE with GreenLake. We moved from selling products to selling services and experience.”

It’s an opportunity for Infoblox partners to keep more capabilities, get “stickier” and provide a better service for their customers, he said. Moreover, Hope wants partners to converge around leading with their own IP and having managed offerings, whether it’s network as a service, security as a service, or some combination of both. Finally, it’s important that partners move toward a predictable annual revenue that comes in year in and year out.

Ultimately, it’s about the customer.

“What’s in it for them is important, like how [the portfolio] fits into the things they’re already doing,” Hope said. “We need to be able to articulate that clearly.”