What was the HP2-K37 exam?
HP2-K37 was a web-based storage sales exam in HP’s ExpertONE certification program. HP’s documentation for this specific code was not preserved, so its exact title cannot be verified. Its siblings are documented and identify the family precisely: HP2-K38 was Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services, HP2-K40 was Selling HP Storage Solutions and Services, and HP2-K41 was Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services. Every archived HP2-K exam is a storage sales exam feeding an HP Sales Certified credential.
The Family Is Unusually Consistent
Most HP exam code families cover a subject area broadly. The HP2-K series is narrower than that: every archived example is specifically about selling storage.
HP2-K38, Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services. Per HP’s datacard: a web-based online exam, 1 hour 15 minutes, 40 questions, 60 percent passing score, delivered in nine languages. Its stated audience was HP channel and distributor attended partners, sales representatives and presales consultants who wanted to understand how to better sell HP enterprise storage solutions and services, with at least one year of experience with HP storage products and services.
HP2-K40, Selling HP Storage Solutions and Services. Per HP’s datacard: 1 hour 15 minutes, 50 questions, 70 percent passing score, leading to HP Sales Certified - Storage Solutions and Services [2015].
HP2-K41, Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services. Per HP’s datacard: 1 hour 15 minutes, 50 questions, 70 percent passing score.
Three things stand out from that set. The duration is identical across all three. The passing score rose from 60 to 70 percent in the later exams, and the question count from 40 to 50, which suggests HP tightened the standard as the series progressed. And the near-identical titles between K38 and K41 reflect HP re-versioning the same exam for a refreshed portfolio rather than creating a genuinely different one.
Given that HP2-K37 sits immediately before HP2-K38 in the sequence, it is very likely an earlier storage sales exam of the same construction, probably at the 40-question, 60 percent standard rather than the later 50-question, 70 percent one. That is an inference from the family pattern, clearly labelled as such, not a claim about the specific exam.
What HP Storage Sales Certification Actually Meant
Vendor sales certifications are easy to dismiss, but within HP’s channel they served a concrete function.
HP required partner organisations to maintain certified staff to hold partner status, which governed access to pricing, deal registration, and program benefits. A sales certification was a compliance requirement that partner firms needed their people to satisfy, not primarily a personal development exercise.
That explains the exam design across this family: web-based rather than proctored, roughly an hour, 40 to 50 questions, and extensive language coverage. HP2-K38’s datacard lists nine delivery languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Castilian Spanish, English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, French and German. These were built to be taken at scale across a global partner network.
It also tells you what holding one signals: that you worked for an HP partner in a storage sales or presales role, and that your firm needed you certified to maintain its standing.
Note the experience expectation on HP2-K38: at least one year working with HP storage products and services. HP’s datacard adds that candidates were expected to have experience selling those solutions, and that completing the associated training alone did not guarantee a pass. These were not pure product-brochure exams.
The Storage Portfolio Behind Them
The products these exams covered are documented through HP’s storage certification datacards from the same period. HP’s ATP - Storage Solutions V1 credential, the technical counterpart to this sales track, validated foundational knowledge of HP 3PAR StoreServ, HP StoreVirtual, and HP StoreOnce, along with converged storage concepts and HP Simply StoreIT solutions for small and midsized businesses.
That gives a reliable picture of what a storage sales exam of this era would have positioned:
- 3PAR StoreServ, the flagship enterprise array line acquired in 2010
- StoreVirtual, the scale-out software-defined line descended from LeftHand Networks
- StoreOnce, the deduplicating backup appliance line
- Simply StoreIT, the SMB-oriented packaging
The commercial skill was matching those to a customer requirement: primary versus scale-out versus backup target, enterprise versus mid-market, and the services attached to each.
What This Is Worth Today
As a current certification, nothing. ExpertONE credentials are retired and cannot be verified as active.
As evidence of storage channel experience, it is specific and real. You sold or presold enterprise storage through HP’s partner network in the mid-2010s, at a firm accredited to do so.
What transferred: the commercial capability. Understanding how storage is positioned and sold, how capacity and performance requirements translate into a proposal, and how attached services change the economics of a deal are durable skills. The discipline of qualifying a storage opportunity properly, asking about growth rates, recovery objectives and existing estate rather than leading with product, is exactly the same conversation today.
What did not: the product specifics and the commercial model. HP’s storage portfolio went to Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the 1 November 2015 company split and changed considerably afterward. More significantly, enterprise storage purchasing shifted substantially from capital purchases of arrays toward subscription, consumption, and as-a-service models, which changed the shape of the sales conversation more than any product refresh did.
How to present it. Name the certification if your records show which one it was, with a year and retired status. The bare code communicates nothing. If your records are incomplete, describe the work: the portfolio you sold, the accounts, the deal sizes, the results. For a sales background, results are the evidence and certifications are corroboration.
Describe it accurately as a sales certification. The HP2-K family was explicitly a sales track, and anyone familiar with the ExpertONE program would recognise an inflated description immediately.
What Cannot Be Verified, and Why
HP published a datacard for every ExpertONE exam giving the official title, duration, question count, passing score, delivery languages, audience, and related certification. Those pages went offline when HP restructured after the company split, and HPE maintains no public archive of them.
Roughly sixty exam datacards survive in the Internet Archive. HP2-K37 is not among them, and no parent certification datacard naming it has been located. This page therefore does not state its title or blueprint.
Third-party sites will supply both confidently. They sell question banks and are frequently inaccurate. In this same research, several such sites classified HP2-Z30 as a storage exam when HP’s own datacard shows it covered networking. A source wrong about a documented exam should not be trusted on an undocumented one.
What To Do If You Hold This Credential
Check your own records first. An HP Learner ID from that period may still retrieve your certification history, and your original certificate or confirmation email will name the credential the exam counted toward. Both are more authoritative about your own history than anything published.
Look to HPE, not HP Inc., for anything current in this area. Enterprise storage went to Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which runs its own partner program with current sales enablement requirements, structured separately from the retired ExpertONE credentials.
Do not recertify for its own sake. A retired sales exam from over a decade ago is not worth pursuing as a credential. If you are still in the channel, current partner program requirements are set by the vendor now and are what actually matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I still take HP2-K37? No. HP’s ExpertONE exams are retired and no longer available.
What was the exam called? HP’s documentation for this specific code was not preserved, so its official title cannot be verified. Its siblings HP2-K38, HP2-K40 and HP2-K41 were all storage sales exams, which places HP2-K37 in that family.
What does the HP2-K prefix indicate? Based on HP’s surviving datacards, HP2 denoted web-based exams and the K series covered storage sales specifically. Every archived HP2-K exam is a Selling HP Storage exam feeding an HP Sales Certified credential.
How long were these exams? All three documented HP2-K exams ran 1 hour 15 minutes. HP2-K38 had 40 questions with a 60 percent pass mark; HP2-K40 and HP2-K41 had 50 questions with a 70 percent pass mark.
Was this a technical certification? No. The HP2-K series were sales certifications aimed at HP’s partner channel, though HP expected candidates to have around a year of real experience with its storage products.
When did it retire? No retirement date is published. HPE does not maintain a public retired-exams list equivalent to those some other vendors publish.
References
HP. ExpertONE Exam Datacard: HP2-K38, Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services. Archived September 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20150914233155/http://h10120.www1.hp.com/expertone/datacard/Exam/HP2-K38 (Primary source for the HP2-K storage sales family: web-based format, 1 hour 15 minutes, 40 questions, 60 percent passing score, nine delivery languages, channel and presales audience, and the one-year experience expectation)
HP. ExpertONE Exam Datacard: HP2-K40, Selling HP Storage Solutions and Services. Archived 2015. (Primary source for the later standard: 1 hour 15 minutes, 50 questions, 70 percent passing score, leading to HP Sales Certified - Storage Solutions and Services [2015])
HP. ExpertONE Exam Datacard: HP2-K41, Selling HP Enterprise Storage Solutions and Services. Archived 2015. (Third HP2-K example, confirming the family pattern and the 50-question, 70 percent standard)
HP. ExpertONE Certification Datacard: HP ATP - Storage Solutions V1. Archived October 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20151004020824/http://h10120.www1.hp.com/expertone/datacard/Certification/ATP-StorSolV1 (Primary source for the HP storage portfolio of this period: 3PAR StoreServ, StoreVirtual, StoreOnce and Simply StoreIT)
HP. ExpertONE Exam Datacard: HP2-Z30, HP FlexNetwork Fundamentals. Archived October 2015. https://web.archive.org/web/20151017200737/http://h10120.www1.hp.com/expertone/datacard/Exam/HP2-Z30 (Basis for the caution about third-party listings misclassifying documented exams)
