HPE's GreenLake hybrid cloud platform is unquestionably a success. First launched in 2018 as a pay-per-use cloud service, since the arrival of CTO Fidelma Russo GreenLake has expanded to become central to HPE's offering and posted massive growth in revenue.
No wonder the company named Russo to lead the new hybrid cloud unit, alongside her other work as company CTO.
As Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE, said at the time: "Fidelma brings deep expertise in cloud services, software, and infrastructure built on an extensive career in technology. Her diverse experience makes her distinctively suited to drive innovation as we accelerate our transformation and bring differentiated solutions to the market."
Long rise to CTO
Born in 1963, Russo studied electrical engineering at University College Cork before completing a masters in computer science at Boston University. From then on, the next thirty years of her CV became a checklist of top tech infrastructure firms: DEC, Dell, Iron Mountain, VMware, and since 2021 HPE, where she now holds the joint roles of EVP & GM for hybrid cloud as well as chief technology officer.
"I think I've been kind of an accidental engineer. If someone said to me: 'You became a CTO — is that what you always wanted?' I would tell you that this is nothing like I ever imagined," she said in an HPE video interview, saying a mentor told her two decades ago she'd make a good CTO, but she was wary of leading strategy. "I've kind of resisted it for a number of years, and then when HPE called, I thought about it and said well I have a lot of experience, maybe it's time for me to be uncomfortable."
Luckily for HPE she said yes — not least as she was the fourth CTO at the company in five years.
Since then, she's led a transformation of the company's hybrid cloud offering, notably the GreenLake product lineup, which offers a public-cloud platform for on-premises infrastructure, offering performance, efficiency, and security benefits.
GreenLake wins
Russo is widely credited with developing the modern version of GreenLake, expanding to focus on hybrid cloud environments, widening its utility to more customers, adding support for edge computing, AI workloads, and more.
In 2023, she said: "Customers should not have to choose between the agility of the public cloud and the performance and control of their private infrastructure. Second, customers want choice and freedom from lock-in. And third, they operate multi-generational, multi-vendor IT estates that need to coexist with the public cloud."
By the end of that year, just two years after Russo joined HPE, GreenLake had topped $1.3 billion in annualized revenue run-rate (ARR), up 48% year-on-year. And the growth has continued: as of 2024, GreenLake boasted an ARR of more than $1.7 billion, with 39,000 unique customers. In March 2025, she noted that GreenLake had grown to 41,000 customers.
No wonder then that Russo was named one of 100 Women In Tech to watch in 2025.
Russo on AI
Russo said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that now is a perfect time to be working in this field, thanks to the explosion of data and the use of it to train AI models, responsibly and sustainably. "It’s a very exciting time, but you have to balance the excitement with maturity to ensure you’re managing this huge transition," she said.
Of AI, she warned we're still in a hype cycle, so predicted disillusionment is still to come. "In the early days of AI, lots of people spent a lot of money but didn’t get a lot of benefit," she said. "It’s essential to pick the right use cases to show success and think about what is important to you when training a model. There’s a whole slew of new questions, but it’s exciting times. This is the next evolution in how technology can help."
