HPE to Make $2B Available to Address COVID-19 Crisis

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced today it will designate $2 billion for financing, a payment relief program, and other initiatives to help customers and partners address IT challenges stemming from the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizations via a new Payment Relief Program can now pay only 1% of the total contract value each month for the first eight months, deferring over 90% of the cost until 2021. Beginning in 2021, each monthly payment would equal approximately 3.3% of the total contract value.

This effort extends previous COVID-19 initiatives rolled out by HPE that include allowing customers to defer payments for as 90 days or longer using a 2020 Payment Relief Program. HPE is also enabling organizations to generate cash by selling existing IT assets back to HPE, which will then make those refurbished assets available to customers that need additional servers and PCs quickly.

HPE is also allowing customers to acquire platforms in a way that allows them to be configured, tested, and deployed before paying.

The goal is to make it easier for organizations to move IT projects forward at a time when liquidity for many companies has become a major issue, says Brad Shapiro, vice president and managing director of the Americas for HPE Financial Services.

“Everybody is looking to preserve cash,” says Shapiro.

Channel partners that take advantage of this program to fund IT projects will be able to access that financing on top of whatever lines of credit can receive from distributors, said Shapiro. While credit rules have not been relaxed, much of the financing provided by HPE will flow through channel partners, said Shapiro.

Interest in new IT solutions for on-premises IT environments varies widely across vertical industries. The healthcare sector clearly needs additional infrastructure capacity to process a massive wave of patient data. Other sectors, such as the travel and hospitality industries, are clearly suffering. Many organizations are, of course, shifting applications to the cloud to make them more accessible. However, with more than three-quarters of all workloads still running on-premises there is need for new IT gear across a broad range of companies that to one degree or another are experiencing cash flow issues.

In addition, many organizations need to bolster server and storage capacity to support entire workforces that are now remotely accessing applications that reside in local data centers.

It remains to be seen how profoundly the COVID-19 pandemic will affect the global economy. However, the one thing that is apparent that as large IT vendors bring their financial resources to bear on the current economic crisis the amount of funding available for IT projects is about to dramatically increase.