First person in Africa earns HP’s highest certification

HP recently announced that Harvey Leibowitz of Aptronics has qualified as an HP Master Accredited Systems Engineer (ASE) Converged Infrastructure Architect.

Aptronics is also the first Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) partner in South Africa which reflects their continued commitment to improving their skills and solutions to their customers. Aptronics believes that training and certification is an investment rather than a cost.

A Master ASE Converged Infrastructure Architect is an HP ExpertONE certified professional who has earned the highest level of credential issued by HP worldwide.

Leibowitz is the only person on the African continent and in the entire MEMA (Middle East Mediterranean Africa) region who is qualified at this level and one of only nine people across the EMEA region.

“I am proud to be the first person in Africa to receive this certification. The opportunity presented itself and a lot of hard work and effort went into it,” says Harvey Leibowitz, Solution Centre Manager, Aptronics. “After my application was successful, I was invited by HP to go overseas to attend two days of classroom training where they also presented a customer scenario on which I based my design. After taking the entrance exam, I then had to present my Converged Infrastructure business solution to the board consisting of C-level executives.”

A Master ASE Converged Infrastructure Architect fully understands the HP Converged Infrastructure architecture and related products as well as a broad range of vendor-neutral concepts and technologies.

“The certification provides the knowledge, experience and community to enable IT professionals to design, operate and manage converged IT infrastructures. It enables technical personnel to design and sell integrated solutions with high business impact and ROI to enterprise customers,” adds Leibowitz.

“This illustrates HP’s continued focus to strive to improve skills and qualifications within its partner base,” says Martin Meltz, Enterprise Channel Manager, HP South Africa.

Candidates for the Converged Infrastructure Architect programme typically have a minimum of 10 years’ experience in enterprise-level infrastructure design. They must also possess all the foundational knowledge in infrastructure frameworks as well as technologies such as servers, storage, networking, management and software, power and cooling, data centres, virtualisation and cloud computing.
“A Converged Infrastructure Architect can maximise your IT investments – the focus is on business outcomes,” adds Meltz. “Enterprises worldwide are shifting from separate IT silos to a unified IT infrastructure – one that integrates servers, storage, network, and management into a single IT fabric. Highly skilled personnel who can realise this vision are in great demand.

The enterprise computing platform is essential to the performance and overall success of a business. An HP Master Accredited Systems Engineer (ASE) Converged Infrastructure Architect can help you make your critical decisions about architecting the infrastructure that will meet your business needs – now and into the future