HP Beefs Up Cloud Management Offerings

Hewlett-Packard has introduced a package of new service offerings to help business and enterprise customers develop hybrid cloud environments that are a combination of private and public clouds for delivery of IT. An industry analyst says this is one of several moves technology vendors like HP have made to become cloud service providers, thus putting them in competition with the service providers to which they sell their hardware.

HP said that its new initiative, announced Tuesday, delivers the "instant-on enterprise" and is intended to help customers consume, build, manage, secure and transform their IT systems for the cloud era.

"We believe it will be a hybrid world," says Patrick Harr, VP of Enterprise Cloud Solutions at HP.

The HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute offering bundles server, storage, networking and security resources into one cloud service. The service establishes requirements for performance, security and privacy, and is scalable as the customer's IT needs grow.

The HP CloudSystem is based on HP Cloud Automation software and its Converged Infrastructure approach to developing IT systems holistically. CloudSystem, which is going to be pitched to business customers and cloud service providers, automates cloud service provisioning.HP Cloud Service Automation is a management system for hybrid private-public clouds that enables easy provisioning and monitoring of cloud environments. Originally introduced last year but combined with this announcement, the automation service maintains security and automatically tracks and allocates service resources.

Lastly, the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop provides training for IT professionals on how to design, deploy and maintain cloud environments. Although the workshop series was also previously announced by HP, Harr said, the training has been enhanced recently for a renewed focus on cloud economics, cloud security and other areas.

The HP announcement indicates a trend among hardware vendors to move into the business of cloud service providers, says Katherine Broderick, a senior research analyst on enterprise platforms and data center trends at the research firm IDC.

Server vendors like HP have historically been "arms dealers," Broderick says, selling their servers and other technology to any and all service providers. With their increased emphasis on building services revenue by offering cloud design and management advice, they are competing with the same service providers to which they are selling.

As they move into the service provider space, "server vendors need to be very clear about their intentions," she said Tuesday in a Webcast with other IDC analysts on the research firm's server forecast for 2011.In a follow-up e-mail interview, Broderick elaborated that "with a move like this, the server vendor needs to communicate clearly with all involved. They need to let their customers and partners know what their strategy is and how it fits in with and supports the service providers' and customers' strategies."

HP, like industry rivals IBM, Cisco Systems, Dell, Oracle and others, have worked in recent years to build their services businesses as a profitable adjunct to sales of hardware and software.

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