HP Moves its Public Cloud Into Publicly Available Beta

Since the announcement last week that Citrix would be moving it’s CloudStack product to Apache, some of the move vociferous support for OpenStack has come from HP, a company that is an active member of OpenStack and has a private beta offering built on top of OpenStack out in the wild.

Today it becomes obvious just how invested HP are in OpenStack with the news that their public cloud product, built on top of OpenStack, is moving into public beta next month. ALongside the public beta launch, there are a host of products and services which show the direction HP is going with the cloud. The full line up of the products, services and training includes;

• HP Cloud Services providing on-demand compute instances or virtual machines, scalable online storage capacity and accelerated delivery of cached content to end users
• HP’s Cloud Maps extend the solution by providing prepackaged application templates that create a customized catalogue of application services ready for push-button deployment
• HP Service Virtualization 2.0 is a sandbox environment that enables clients to test the quality and performance of cloud or mobile applications without disrupting production systems
• HP Virtual Application Networks automates management and ensures network service levels in delivering cloud and virtualized applications across the HP FlexNetwork architecture
• HP Enterprise Cloud Services provides offerings for private clouds, continuity services and unified communications
• New Engineering Cloud Transformation Services help product development and engineering design teams move to the cloud
•  New Cloud Security Alliance training courses for third party security training

MyPOV

The HP offering makes sense as it helps traditional enterprises move to the cloud, something that other public cloud providers enable through third party channel partners HP is offering within its own stable – the combination of product offerings, consulting services and even training opportunities, all backed by HP’s own brand in the marketplace should prove compelling to the more traditional organizations out there.

HP also has arguably a better chance of pulling this off than other traditional vendors since they aren’t so strongly tied to traditional software offerings that would limit how hard it can push into the cloud arena. It also has good revenue streams from areas that a move to the cloud doesn’t threaten – server hardware, printers and PCs for example. Lastly they strongly articulate the need for a hybrid approach towards moving to the cloud, and put security concerns front and center which will appeal to more traditional IT folks.

HP has a big opportunity in the cloud – it is interesting seeing them build out their offering.