Dave Frederickson, executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development at Long View Systems There are not many people who can look at HPE Discover 2026 from the vantage point of someone who helped build it. Dave Frederickson spent over 24 years at HP, including leading the enterprise servers, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He joined Long View Systems in June 2012 and is now executive vice president of strategic alliances and business development. That backstory matters, because Dave comes to this week with something almost no one else on the show floor has: direct memory of the HP that lost its way, the acquisition misadventures, and what it looks like when a large technology company loses focus. His verdict on the HPE of 2026? It has its mojo back – and the Juniper integration is the piece that finally makes the networking-plus-compute-plus-storage story credible in a way it could not be before. We also get into the real operational cost of the January quote-cycle crisis – the move to 7- and 14-day quote windows that Dave says created “an astronomical amount of overhead” for Long View’s operations teams – and what the return to 30-day quote validity actually signals coming out of the Partner Growth Summit. On AI, Dave pushes back – respectfully – on Antonio Neri’s keynote framing that the network is the foundation. For Long View, the conversation still starts at the data and governance layer. And he flags tokenomics as the near-term friction point that is coming for a lot of organizations faster than they may realize, with cost predictability becoming the real barrier to AI ROI conversations. For more from HPE Discover 2026, see our full coverage hub and our earlier preview episode with Jeremiah Jenson, VP of North America channel at HPE. Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re here at HPE Discover in Las Vegas this week, and sometimes the best conversations happen by accident. Dave Frederickson is executive vice president of Strategic Alliances and Business Development at Long View Systems, one of Canada’s leading IT solution providers. But what makes Dave’s take on this week uniquely worth hearing is what he did before he got to Long View. Many in the channel know Dave for his 24 years at HP. He led the channel for a long time, and he spent some time leading the enterprise server, storage, and networking business for HP Canada right around the time Discover was created as a unified event in 2011. He’s been on the partner side now for 14 years, and that gives him an interesting lens on HPE – where it has been, where it’s struggled, and where it is today – that very few people walking the show floor this week can match. I happened to catch up with Dave at the airport in Vegas after we both arrived here, and he graciously agreed to sit down and share his thoughts on this week. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Dave Frederickson. ROBERT DUTT: Dave, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. DAVE FREDERICKSON: My pleasure. ROBERT DUTT: I have to ask you the obvious one first. If I’m thinking back correctly to your time at HP, you were actually leading ESSN around the time that HP Discover became a thing in 2011. And here you are 15 years later at HPE’s major show Discover, representing one of the major Canadian partners. Does it feel a little bit like old home week? And also, what’s it like to make the mental switch – I know it’s been a while now, obviously – to make the mental switch from the vendor side of the table to the partner side? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Well, I have to say, 14 years ago at the end of this month is when I left HP. And I will say that every time I come to Discover, there’s a certain nostalgia. But also, I definitely miss it. There’s certain parts of it. I miss the big show. I miss the IP. I don’t necessarily miss having to go to 8,000 meetings over the course of however many [X] days, although I still do quite a few. But yeah, no, there’s definitely – look, and I’m pretty excited about how things are right now. So yeah, it’s definitely – I miss the show a little bit, even on the partner side. ROBERT DUTT: As I say, coming up on 14 years, how is your understanding of what HP is and what the relationship between HP and partners looks like evolved from what you knew when you were on the other side of the house? What did you not really fully appreciate about the HPE relationship until you were on the side of the table you’re on now? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah, I think there’s a few things that kind of unpack that. One was just the ability on the partner side and the necessity for you to represent the client in a way that isn’t necessarily tied to a particular brand. And also the trust that, once earned, a client will put in you once you kind of make that shift over. And so I remember having a senior executive at one of the banks kind of say to me that, you know, “I never knew, you only had one flavor of Kool-Aid that you were drinking, so I know you were serving up to me every time.” Now, I appreciated the fact that I was coming in with maybe an unbiased, more of an unbiased view. So that’s probably the biggest one. The other one would be profitability and understanding the impact and the requirements. I mean, it was always there, right? I always said if you wanted loyalty from a channel partner, buy a dog. But really, profitability is the key to be able to continue sustainable relationships and partnerships. ROBERT DUTT: The Juniper acquisition closed less than a year ago. Clearly, it’s the structural story underneath everything we’re talking about here. The network is the foundation of AI, the Power of One, the unification of Aruba, Juniper, and the HPE compute and storage side of things. From Long View’s perspective, what has the acquisition changed in the conversation that you’re having with customers and the conversation that you’re having internally about the HPE relationship with Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So I mean, first off, it’s an interesting challenge it poses because we also have to have a very big, strong relationship with another strong networking organization. And I think that this has really opened, at least my eyes, and I get a whole new sense of kind of energy that’s also coming forward with it. And I think that HPE and Antonio has put together a set of pieces in this puzzle, if you want to call it, that he’s executing on. And with Juniper now, it’s a pretty powerful message. So I think there’s still a lot that we need to unpack and to understand a little bit more, but it’s an exciting time. And I think this positions them in a way that they couldn’t do it before. So yeah, it’s really, really interesting to see how the next number of months pan out. ROBERT DUTT: You were at the Partner Growth Summit yesterday. Real package of operational changes. That keynote, between 30-day quote validity finally, expanded credit lines, different financing options, new channel-only products in Private Cloud and Zerto. Is there anything in what was announced at Growth Summit that kind of really hit hard or made you say, finally, or this changes something for us specifically? What, among what was announced at Growth Summit, kind of hit most meaningful from where you are at Long View? DAVE FREDERICKSON: Yeah. So first off, I think the quote cycle that happened in January-ish timeframe, I’ve never seen anything like it in our industry. And I’ve told many clients this, like going to 7 or 14 days quote cycle, I mean, it’s unheard of. So to get back to a 30-day is pretty substantial. And by the way, the amount of rework that is required internally on us – so to me, that was probably a pain point to our operations teams because the amount of extra work that was required, the amount of times they had to do multiple quotes for the same piece of business or the same request for a client. I mean, it adds an astronomical amount of overhead. So to me, that was the one that said, OK, good. I don’t know if that’s signaling that there’s a correction that’s coming relative to the problems that we had. I suspect they’re still going to see escalating costs because I don’t think the work for data centres anywhere is anywhere near finished, by any stretch of the imagination. But yeah, I’d say that that was the big one. And look, the other financing options, we were exploring and educating customers because it did actually provide an ease, at least for those that could take advantage of it. Those that could do that. There was another angle – if they didn’t have the budget, they got a different shock all of a sudden, something escalated. Because it was an unheard of increase in prices. And it was across the industry. Hopefully, as you say, we don’t know for sure. But it seems like with HPE being willing to make that move, there’s at least some sense that, yes, things are probably going to rise, but in a more manageable, more predictable kind of fashion, so at least they can stand behind their pricing for a month. ROBERT DUTT: Yeah, I mean, annual budget cycles is really the reality of almost every IT organization. DAVE FREDERICKSON: So how do you deal with that? I hope so. ROBERT DUTT: On the partner branded services, it sounds like it’s basically HPE infrastructure support that you can deliver under your own brand. Seems like a big one for partners moving towards a services-led model. Something that you guys are thinking about. Is it something that you’re already planning? Is it something that meshes with h
