‘My concern would be does this turn into a reason or rationale for customers to start delaying decisions,’ says Advizex CEO C.R. Howdyshell. ‘It is not going to get better. Given the amount of time it takes to get a new quote for GreenLake, it could be an issue.’
Partners told CRN they are concerned about how new HPE pricing terms and conditions in response to soaring memory prices could impact the HPE GreenLake platform.
The quoting process for partners selling GreenLake—the popular HPE hybrid cloud pay-per-use platform—is much different than a typical on-premises server deal.
First, GreenLake is often sold in three- or five-year deals with a longer sales cycle of three to 12 months, resulting in a much more complex sales quote process for the channel, solution providers said. What’s more, customers receive lower pricing as they consume more GreenLake services.
The concerns stem from a February 5 letter from HPE Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channel and Partner Ecosystem Simon Ewington that told partners HPE is making changes in “pricing and quote validity” in the wake of rising memory prices and supply constraints that are currently plaguing the industry.
Specifically, HPE is shortening “the quote validity windows to 14 days (excluding public sector, B2B, OEM),” down from 30 days, and has “updated the contract terms and conditions for server and GreenLake orders to allow for price adjustments until the date of shipment.”
GreenLake orders accepted prior to February 4 are not impacted by the new terms and conditions, HPE told CRN in a statement.
C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Independence, Ohio-based Advizex, No. 129 on the 2025 CRN Solution Provider 500, said he is anxious to see how the new HPE pricing policies impact the sales quote process for GreenLake.
“My concern would be does this turn into a reason or rationale for customers to start delaying decisions,” said Howdyshell. “It is not going to get better. Given the amount of time it takes to get a new quote for GreenLake, it could be an issue. It is a significant time investment to requote and then requote again. To have to go through this is going to be a time sink for partner salespeople. Nobody has extra cycles right now.”
The change could impact sales productivity, said Howdyshell, with sales reps potentially looking at alternatives to GreenLake. “If they can’t stand by a price with GreenLake, they will propose something else,” he said.
The danger with rapidly changing memory prices in a GreenLake price quote could result in a situation where partners are giving “budgetary quotes to customers with a variance of 30 percent,” said Howdyshell. “What customer is going to do that on a $1 million dollar proposal?”
Ewington told CRN that pricing changes allowed under updated partner terms and conditions in response to soaring memory prices for both GreenLake and server orders will be uncommon.
“While we have adjusted our terms and conditions, we do not anticipate changes for most partners, and pricing changes will be rare,” said Simon in an email response to CRN’s request for an interview on the situation.
HPE declined to make Ewington available, citing the quiet period ahead of the release of its first fiscal quarter earnings.
In a separate statement, HPE said it expects those rare circumstances to only occur if “there are material changes to our forecasted increase in commodity costs.”
The CEO for a top HPE partner, who did not want to be identified, said the new pricing terms and conditions could cause customers to consider a public cloud alternative.
“What we are finding is that it is becoming easier for customers to go to the public cloud because at least they can start and stop when they want, where they know exactly what the price is,” he said. “If this is a two-year challenge with memory prices, companies might decide to do public cloud for two years at a consistent price and then go back to GreenLake when prices go back down to normal.”
With memory prices going up double-digits each quarter, solution providers might be forced to reprice proposals a half-dozen times or more during the lengthy GreenLake sales cycle, said the CEO. “This makes it more difficult for customers to lock in a price,” he said.
HPE: GreenLake ‘Value Propositions Remain Strong’
In a statement provided to CRN, HPE said GreenLake continues to provide “customers the benefits of on-prem control, cloud management experience, storage, virtualization, observability, AIOps and at significantly lower cost than public cloud.”
What’s more, HPE said the GreenLake “value propositions remain strong even in a cost-inflationary environment affecting the IT industry worldwide.”
HPE also said recent enhancements to the GreenLake self-serve quoting tool provide partners with quotes in less than 24 hours, enabling partners to accelerate their sales cycles.
“GreenLake enables customers to buy only the capacity they need today, avoiding the over-provisioning costs of CapEx by up to 45 percent, while ensuring access to up to 20 percent reserve capacity, which they do not pay for until they use it,” said HPE. “Unlike CapEx, GreenLake relies on usage analytics to determine whether additional capacity is required. This gives HPE and customers a longer runway to predict capacity and optimize expansions that align more favorably to market timing.”
HPE said GreenLake continues to offer “exceptional value.”
“GreenLake allows customers to preserve free cash flow while offering consistent overall lower total cost of ownership when compared with CapEx and hyperscaler models,” said HPE. “HPE’s capacity usage analyses have consistently identified that CapEx purchase models lead to customers buying and paying for excess capacity, burdening their overall budgets with technology they will not use for multiple years.”
