Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) poached former Hitachi Vantara leader Sheila Rohra as COO of its Hybrid Cloud business.

Rohra joins HPE after serving almost three years as CEO and president of the storage vendor, having resigned in late March for "personal reasons." She was replaced by the president of Hitachi Vantara Japan, Akinobu Shimada.

In an email sent to SDxCentral, HPE confirmed the move, highlighting Rohra’s 30-year plus experience as a “proven technology executive."

“She will build on the team’s strong foundation to accelerate execution, innovation, growth, and scale across the portfolio,” HPE said in a statement.

Rohra replaces Hang Tan in the role, who departed HPE in April. She will report to Fidelma Russo, CTO for HPE and EVP and GM of HPE Hybrid Cloud.

HPE’s new cloud COO is no stranger to HPE, having worked as SVP and GM for its data infrastructure business between 2021 and 2023 before moving on to Hitachi in her initial role as chief business strategy officer.

Rohra also served a decade at NetApp, where she started as chief of staff before becoming chief transformation officer in 2015, and SVP for customer success in 2019.

The biggest patch on her CV is Cisco, where she worked for over 12 years. On LinkedIn, her job title is listed as business operations leader, Core Technology Group for the entire period.

She joins HPE as revenues from its Cloud & AI division surged more than 25% year-on-year to $9 billion in its latest earnings.

The vendor’s hybrid cloud business includes HPE CloudOps Software Suite, OpsRamp, Zerto, and the virtualization lynchpins of VM Essentials and Morpheus.

HPE's strategy to tempt the virtualization market away from Broadcom saw recent success with British soccer club Tottenham Hotspur FC, whose recent stadium refit saw HPE replace its entire VMware estate with a reported 85% licensing saving.