Inside HPE Erskine – where enterprise technology gets a new lease of life

Should companies invest in refurbished tech? Well, five years ago the answer might have been different, but HPE is proving that the enterprise market for pre-owned hardware is booming. Nestled in Erskine, Scotland, HPE's 240,000 square foot technology renewal centre receives 150 pallets and processes around 8,000 to 9,000 individual assets every day. Formerly a compact manufacturing facility, the site leverages the deep technical heritage of its 200 strong workforce. Technicians are Ministry of Defence cleared to clean, sanitise and restore hardware back into the market, with security and quality top of mind. In 2026, our understanding and the knowledge of the life cycle is far greater than other technology waves we've experienced. You know, how you source materials, what you do at the end of life with those materials, what is the usage of those materials, how do you increase your utilisation of those assets. And they are designed in mind to be more cyclical in nature. So I would argue, although there is a thirst for speed in AI, and there's going to be more and more technology that becomes more advanced, we know how to build for the whole lifecycle of those assets. But we've got to make sure that we are holding ourselves accountable and leveraging that, I think, would be my view. But is this something modern enterprises can actually benefit from? I would say the market has actually increased considerably Really? for pre-owned products. The attitude has changed. Pre-owned is a great solution. You know, it's... We can deliver fast at competitive prices and I think demand has been very strong. Professionally what we do, we use HPE test infrastructure, so supply chain is using the same test infrastructure that we're using. So our quality standards are very high and actually the quality of product from pre-owned is actually extremely high. When you think about it, a server's maybe potentially been running solid for three years, you know, somebody's tested it for three years and they've still got an awful lot of life left in it, you know, so, but when they see how we handle and how we deal with things, That answers an awful lot of questions in terms of trust and performance of the assets that they buy. Would your business trust certified pre-owned tech? For more on this story visit itpro.com