5 HPE Server Incentive Promotions That Partners Need To Know About

Hewlett Packard Enterprises has launched several server incentives partner promotions around Windows Server 2008 replacement and pre-packed SKUs with built-in discounts.

HPE’s Server Incentive Promotions

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is helping partners make more money through various incentive promotions and programs aimed at hot market opportunities including the approaching Microsoft Server 2008 end of life support early next year.

“In North America, we’ve identified that there are still nearly 4.5 million servers out there that are still running this old operating system, and the vast majority of those servers that are still running that old OS are on old servers,” said Ben Hodgson, ProLiant Server Category Manager at HPE during a session at XChange 2019. “This is a ripe opportunity to upgrade your customers hardware as well as their operating systems to the latest and greatest technology.”

Here are five server incentive partner promotions that solution providers should take advantage of.

Race To Replace

HPE’s Race to Replace promotion is all around attacking market opportunities as Microsoft ends support in January 2020 for Microsoft Server 2008.

“If businesses wait until January 2020, they will no longer have any free support for that operating systems, there will no longer be any free security updates and there will no longer be any feature updates,” said Hodgson. “If this is something that is deployed across your entire data center and you rely on all of these things, this will severely impact you.”

HPE is offering partners cost-effective HPE Gen10 servers with Windows Server 2016 attached. As part of HPE ROK (Reseller Option Kit), the offer also includes a no-charge 90-day warranty with installation support and is pre-tested to include all the latest technology in the HPE portfolio.

“In North America, we’ve identified that there are still nearly 4.5 million servers out there that are still running this old operating system, and the vast majority of those servers that are still running that old OS are on old servers too,” said Hodgson. “This is a ripe opportunity to upgrade your customers hardware as well as their operating systems to the latest and greatest technology.”

Smart Buy Express

Smart Buy Express is a promotion where HPE provides ready to go, right-sized bundled SKUs that are aggressively priced with discounts built-in.

“Smart Buy Express are built to order SKUs. These are SKUs ready to go off the shelf. We’ve already populated them with various server options and we already pre-discounted them too,” said Hodgson. “So we’re trying to allow for the quickest sale possible and we’re trying to allow the quickest shipment.”

Hodgson said the promotion applies to nearly all of HPE’s servers available in the market. “That applies basically to all our servers that we have out there. Everything from our MicroServer towers, then all of our rack systems too – the 1U, 2U and our big 4U processor systems as well.”

Smart Buy Express Price Drop

In a promotion to help partners better sell its ProLiant Gen10 server line, HPE recently dropped the average price tag by 9 percent.

“We’ve been trying to make these as attractive as possible to try and get everyone to jump on these,” said Hodgson. “To get deeper into our Smart Buy Express promotion, we actually made an effort to lower our prices even more on these pre-discounted SKUs.”

Among the Smart Buy Express systems impacted by the price drop: HPE’s ProLiant DL380 Gen10 2U; the ProLiant DL360 Gen10 1U and the ProLiant DL325 Gen10 .

Additionally, HPE’s DL160 1U server, which was previously only available to certain customers, is now available for partners to sell through the promotion.

Keynon Lannom, CEO, President of, NewQuest IT Solutions, a San Angelo, Texas-based solution provider, said the Smart Buy Express promotion with the price drop is “very appealing.”

“HPE’s promotions seem to be targeting emerging opportunities – like the Microsoft Server 2008 and a price drop in serves as commonization in the market continues,” said Lannom. “It’s good for the channel in that it gives us better bundle offerings and new talking points to customers.”

Engage & Grow

HPE’s Engage & Grow is a partner incentive program that rewards solution provider sales representatives for selling across the HPE portfolio and delivering solutions to customers. In addition to rewards for sales achievements, sales representatives have the opportunity to participate in many different product, solutions and program training as well as in contests and sweepstakes.

“It offers reward points for selling various technologies from HPE that’s on a by partner basis,” said Hodgson (pictured). Eligible servers in the promotion include HPE ProLiant ML Gen10 and ProLiant DL Gen10 servers.

Customer Trade-In Server Promotion

HPE has a customer trade-in server promotion underway where customers can get additional cash back per server. Partners can reduce their customer total cost of a server by trading in their old equipment and replacing it with a new server.

Customers get additional incentives per server replacement with any HPE server. A client can get an additional incentive per server if they replace it with a HPE server that has an AMD processor such as the ProLiant DL325 Gen10 and DL385 Gen10. A customer is also given an extra incentive for each purchase of a Microsoft Window 2016 Enterprise ROK edition.

“This is just an easy way to save customers money and help partners,” said Hodgson.