Restrained budgets caused by pandemic-related uncertainty means investment in digital transformation has faltered a bit.

However, because of pandemic-driven demand, every company is now a technology company, according to Hewlett Packard Enterprises financial services arm. It means that the organizations have become dependent on tech during COVID, whether that be for remote working or newly found internal inspiration to accelerate modernization.

“So [its] crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology,” said Paul Sheeran (pictured right), managing director of worldwide channel and SMB at HPE Financial Services. “The pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability is.”

Funding is something HPE Financial services says it can help customers with.

“Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation,” explained Brad Shapiro (pictured left), vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE Financial Services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

Sheeran and Shapiro spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the HPE Discover event. They discussed how companies can add to their budgets through repurposing old tech plus use other HPE-derived fiscal tools. (* Disclosure below.)

Monetizing end-of-life assets

The HPE Financial Services arm is keen to iterate that it shouldn’t be considered merely a bank.

“Yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning,” Shapiro said. But, asset management is also a part of it. Assets being reused within a company or being repurposed somewhere else for cash injections, or even for pure sustainability, are competencies he says they can help with. Assets are used tech, basically.

“Budgets are tight, and what we’re trying to do is give them that boost,” Sheeran added. “How we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner moved to a digital platform.”

HPE Financial Services can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation, according to Shapiro. The organization claims to handle between 3 to 4 million assets per year. Ninety percent are reused; and 10% goes to recycling.

“We monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation,” Shapiro stated. More budget found for new HPE products, is the result, in other words. “We believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it’s also good for business,” he added.

Digital transformation

Seventy-three percent of organizations delayed or cancelled IT transformation due to COVID-caused uncertainty, HPE says it’s found.

“What we’re hearing is, especially for SMB customers, cash is king. It’s all about cash preservation,” according to Sheeran, who specializes in SMB. “Some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty. But you have to invest. If they don’t invest they are going to be dead in the water.”

That’s to stay ahead of the competition. “We’re looking to really help those customers preserve that cash.” He gave an example: a university in Colombia who needed to invest in remote learning platforms. HPE identified underused assets in the school’s compute estate, many of which were end-of-life, so not worth much all that much, except incidental sustainability kudos. It did inject some cash though.

The company then looked at existing fiscal contracts with banks and arranged restructuring. It gave them “additional capacity to invest right now in technology,” Sheeran concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for HPE Discover. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE