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.