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Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor

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HP Nearing Launch of Public Cloud Service

One year has passed since Hewlett-Packard announced its plans to launch a public cloud service and it appears that service will arrive in May.

Zorawar Biri Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud services business last week told The New York Times that the service is on pace to go online in two months. While HP is launching a portfolio of public cloud infrastructure services similar to those of Amazon Web Services, Singh is setting modest expectations for taking on the behemoth.

"We won't pull (Amazon's) customers out by the horns but we already have customers in beta who see us as a great alternative,"Singh said, adding HP does not intend to compete on price. Fully aware that Amazon has aggressively cut its rates, Singh said HP will compete by offering more "personal sales and service."

Of course, HP won't stand alone on that front as players such as Rackspace, IBM and Microsoft, just to name a few, promote their focus on customer service. That said, HP can't afford not to offer a viable public cloud service for enterprises. Along with its public cloud service, Singh said HP will offer:

  • Tools for Ruby, Java and PHP developers
  • Support for provisioning and management of workloads remotely
  • An online store where customers can rent software in HP's cloud (as indicated last year)
  • Connectivity to private clouds
  • A platform layer with third party services

Offering software as a service also appears high on the agenda. The first will be a data analytics service, leveraging last year's acquisitions of Vertica and Autonomy.

HP's cloud services will launch initially with datacenters in the United States on both the east and west coasts, with a global rollout to follow. Like any major IT vendor, HP knows it must execute well in the cloud. Even if it isn't a major revenue generator in the short term, a robust cloud portfolio will be critical to HP's future.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 15, 2012


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