HP Launches 'New-Style' Financing Options To Help Partners Close More Deals

Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Friday launched new financing options, including a Moonshot-Converged System monthly payment plan, aimed at helping partners close more deals for next-generation IT solutions.

The Moonshot-Converged System offering is one of three new plans being offered by HP Financial Services, one of the largest IT financing units with more than $12 billion in IT assets on its books.

The new HP Financial Services options, unveiled on the eve of HP's Discover conference, which runs from Dec. 10-12 in Barcelona, Spain, are going to become increasingly important as customers move to next-generation converged offerings such as Moonshot, said Fred Traversi, president of AdvizeX Technologies, one of HP's top 10 enterprise partners and a unit within services giant Rolta, a $500 million IT services powerhouse.

"Clearly, more customers want to buy on an opex [operating expense-based] model versus a capex [capital expenditure] model and this provides you the capability to do that," he said. "With some of the new financial options, you don't even pay on an opex model, you pay on an opex model as you use capacity This is another way to aggressively compete in the marketplace once customers have made the technology decision."

The other two HP financing options are a pre-provisioning solution that lets customers take delivery of IT equipment immediately but only pay when it is "deployed and activated," and an accelerated migration program for the cloud that opens the door for HP to buy back on-premise solutions.

NEXT: HP Financial Services Adds New-Style IT Investment Options

HP is "accelerating" its push to offer new investment solutions to drive new-style IT purchases, said Gerri Gold, vice president of global sales, business development and asset management services at HP Financial Services. She said the new options are based on comprehensive feedback from customers over the past year.

"We know the biggest inhibitor to transitioning to the new style of IT is how customers can do it with the budgets that they have available," she said.

HP is aggressively educating its partners on just how critical financing is in helping them close deals faster and at higher margin, said Gold.

"What we are all about is helping our channel partners bring something unique and different to their customers much earlier in the selling cycle so they are not relegated to selling a product at the lowest price," she said. "That is not a sustainable model in this new style of IT."

HP also rolled out what it is calling a "complete transparency" pledge aimed at building trust with customers as they enter into financing options to upgrade their IT environments. "This sets a clear standard for what customers can expect from us," said Gold of the transparency pledge. "What we want to do is make customers feel very confident they don't need to be concerned [about unexpected charges]."

Lee Eberding, director of marketing and business for HP Financial Services with 10 years of experience in channel financing, said the new financing options are making it palatable for customers to make the move to new-style cloud-based solutions.

"Everybody knows they need to move to more of a cloud-based environment but yet a majority of companies out there continue to pay cash for assets and build data centers," he said. "You can see it in people's eyes -- they know they are doing the wrong thing but they are not sure what else to do because that is what they have always done. These offers help them move either gradually or very aggressively to the new style of IT."

PUBLISHED DEC. 6, 2013