4 Big Benefits Of HPE Financial Services 'Circular Economy' Offerings
“Very few people were thinking about sustainability in an IT context until we introduced circular economy,” said HPE Financial Services President and CEO Irv Rothman.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Financial Services, which is doubling down on its channel business with new sales coverage and resources for partners, is driving a breakthrough concept called the “circular economy” into the tech world—the sustainable reuse of IT assets that provides dramatic financial and environmental benefits.
“Very few people were thinking about sustainability in an IT context until we introduced circular economy,” said HPE Financial Services President and CEO Irv Rothman.
Last year, 4 million assets were returned to HPE Financial Services—with 89 percent of them being refurbished and remarketed back into the circular economy for reuse.
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Christopher Wellise, chief sustainability officer for HPE, said key to HPE’s circular economy success is the company’s long “legacy and track record” for refurbishing and remarketing IT assets. “You don’t want your assets to end up in the wrong place,” he said. “You want them to be dealt with, from a security standpoint, appropriately.”
In an interview with CRN, Rothman detailed four keys for partners looking to take advantage of the circular economy.
1. The Power Of The Circular Economy
HPE Financial Services has been in the circular economy business our entire existence for the last 20 years. We are all about renewing assets at the back end of a financing. We are all about reusing assets by remarketing them. We are all about extending the life of assets. We have this asset upcycling program, which is a circular economy program. We purchase assets from a customer that are either over-capacity or have reached the end of life. We provide the customer with transformation dollars. IT budgets are not getting any bigger. This gets the channel talking about sustainability, which everyone wants to talk about.
2. The Power Of Pay Per Use
Our ability to evaluate, take and manage asset risk is the underpinning to all these subscription, usage, utilization consumption models [like HPE GreenLake]. You can’t walk into a customer and say, ‘You are in the middle of digital transformation, let me sell you some equipment.’ The future is too uncertain, which is why customers want to move to consuming rather than owning IT. In order to make this price-competitive, you have to be able to take the risks associated with the assets. That is what we do better than anybody else does in the world.
3. The Trusted Adviser Asset Upcycling Advantage
Before, [partners] were only trying to sell the customer something. Now they are not only trying to sell the customer something, they are providing a means to enable that transformation. They are also providing a means for a company to have a social conscience through life-cycle asset management. When you go in there to have that conversation with a customer, that is a different conversation. You are getting trusted adviser status, and it’s a way to make money too.
4. Financial Impact On The Customer
The average data center has about $157 million worth of hardware. Last year, [HPE Financial Services] by ourselves put $330 million back into customers’ pockets through this asset upcycling services activity. That $330 million is cash that we provided to customers for use in their digital transformation by acquiring assets that were either excess capacity or fully depreciated. We had a customer in which we upcycled all of their [old and over-capacity] network equipment. They got 750 networking assets in the first asset upcycling project they did with us. Of the assets they returned to date, about 95 percent of them have been remarketed by us. They used the revenue generated from that remarketing for their IT innovation budget. In 2018, we had [asset upcycling deals] from $25,000 to $10 million in every industry you can think of.
HPE FINANCIAL SERVICES BREAKTHROUGHS
Technomics Mobile App For Partners
A new mobile app—which includes capabilities like auto-credit decisions, document generation and e-signature—takes the time to complete an HPE Financial Services application from several hours to just minutes. Currently being piloted in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, U.K., Spain, Australia and New Zealand.
Single Bill/Flexible Billing
For the first time, partners in the U.S. and Canada can add their own variable services into a single customer bill produced and sent directly by HPE Financial Services.
Paperless Invoices
HPE Financial Services partners can now provide paperless invoices through the Partner Connection portal.