HP is offering zero percent finance to prospective customers of its key systems management products, provided a deal exceeds $100,000 and can be agreed by the end of January 2009.
News of the promotion came out at HP’s annual Software Universe user group meeting being held this week in Vienna, Austria and covers the company’s information management software and business technology optimisation (BTO) products.
HP has been pushing BTO for the last two or three years as an approach to IT management that reduces costs.
The idea is that IT managers make better decisions if they can allocate IT spend and resources according to business priorities and measure IT effectiveness and efficiency from a business perspective. BTO software enables this.
The BTO initiative is underpinned by the vendor’s various service management, performance management, and portfolio management toolsets. The finance promotion covers these and also the licensing of information management software for enterprise data warehousing, database and email archiving.
With enterprise customers facing downward budget pressures and calls on company cash HP’s manoeuvring on software leasing is made out of necessity rather than choice.
The company also announced that it would make its business technology optimisation products more affordable in other ways, by making them available as a software service rather than the usual enterprise or server-based licensing terms.