Hewlett Packard Enterprise runs one of the largest and most technically sophisticated pre-sales organizations in enterprise technology. With solutions spanning compute, storage, networking, and hybrid cloud, HPE's Sales Engineers routinely need to deliver live, hands-on product demonstrations to enterprise buyers — often simultaneously across multiple accounts, geographies, and solution areas.

The problem: their lab infrastructure couldn't keep up. Each new demo environment required manual setup across on-premises hardware — a process that averaged two to four business days. With hardware capacity capped, the SE team could run only a handful of concurrent demos at any given time. During peak sales periods, this became a critical bottleneck.

Beyond capacity, consistency was a persistent issue. Manually built lab environments were subject to configuration drift, version mismatches, and undocumented dependencies. A demo that ran perfectly in one environment would fail unpredictably in another — with buyers watching. Each failed demo carried both a deal risk and a brand risk.

HPE evaluated several approaches to solving the demo infrastructure problem, including expanding on-premises hardware, building a custom cloud automation layer, and partnering with hyperscalers directly. Each option carried significant capital expenditure, long lead times, and ongoing operational overhead that would fall back on the SE team.

TechAccelerator's Lab-as-a-Service platform offered a fundamentally different model: fully managed, infinitely scalable cloud labs with flat-rate pricing — no per-lab fees, no hardware procurement, no provisioning scripts to maintain. The platform's Tier 5® infrastructure provided the enterprise-grade reliability and security HPE required for customer-facing demonstrations. Key factors in the decision:

• Flat-rate pricing: Predictable costs regardless of demo volume, enabling HPE to scale without financial risk.
• White-label branding: Lab environments fully branded as HPE, maintaining a consistent buyer experience.
• Salesforce integration: Lab provisioning connected directly to CRM workflows, eliminating manual coordination.
• 24/7 expert support: TechAccelerator's team handles infrastructure issues, freeing HPE SEs to focus on customer conversations.
• Built-in LMS: Enabled HPE to onboard new SEs on the platform in days, not weeks.

TechAccelerator worked with HPE's pre-sales operations team to migrate their most-used demo environments first — HPE GreenLake, Alletra storage, and Aruba networking configurations. The TechAccelerator team handled environment configuration, branding, and integration with HPE's Salesforce instance.

Within the first two weeks, HPE SEs were provisioning labs in under 10 minutes using a self-service portal. The 30-day pilot validated that environments were consistent, reliable, and fully reproducible — eliminating the configuration drift that had caused demo failures.

Full production rollout followed in week five, with the broader SE team onboarded through the built-in LMS. Within 60 days of go-live, HPE had retired the on-premises demo lab hardware entirely.

Following the success of the pre-sales deployment, HPE is expanding TechAccelerator's Lab-as-a-Service platform to two additional use cases: channel partner enablement and customer training.

Channel partners can now self-provision branded HPE lab environments to run their own customer demos — without any involvement from HPE's SE team. And new HPE customers receive hands-on training labs as part of onboarding, reducing time-to-value and improving retention.

Both expansions run on the same TechAccelerator platform and flat-rate contract — no additional licensing, no incremental infrastructure cost.