Former Oracle executive Pieter Bensch has been appointed managing director of HP's local operation, a position held by Frank van Rees since January 2010.
Bensch officially took up the position as MD of HP at the beginning of this week, prior to which he held various positions at Oracle, since 2005. These included vice-president of Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), vice-president of customer support for MEA and, finally, vice-president and MD of Oracle SA (since November 2010).
Bensch was not immediately available for comment and HP could not confirm details regarding Van Rees by the time of publication.
Van Rees was appointed as local HP MD at the end of 2009, after having held the position of HP services director at HP Netherlands, after which he was appointed enterprise business lead for the Dutch branch. Prior to HP, he was sales and marketing director for Synstar Netherlands, which is now part of HP.
At the time of his local appointment, HP said he would be responsible for driving the HP enterprise business in SA.
Under Bensch, Oracle last year debuted the first local CIO Summit, which addressed the changing role of the CIO and the top IT strategy issues for the year.
Update
According to HP EMEA, van Rees has been redeployed within HP and now heads up the service provider businesss for one of he company's regions in Europe.
HP says Bensch has an extensive career within the technology industry in Oracle Corporation. "[He was] born and raised in South Africa [and has a] keen interest in applying innovation and new technologies to keep business agile.
"He is a people-focused person and takes pride in driving growth strategies to take market share." The company says more communication around he appointment will be forthcoming "once [Bensch] has commenced".
Share