Blue Skies Ahead for HP Cloud Services?

Recently, HP announced its first public cloud services available as a public beta, and it is creating a stir in the cloud arena. On May 10, 2012, HP released three beta services that are the first of their kind under the company’s Converged Cloud portfolio. HP Cloud Compute (on-demand virtual servers), HP Cloud Object Store (online storage), and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network (global content delivery) are all available via a pay-as-you-go model. Pricing is tiered – for example, a standard medium instance for HP Cloud Compute that delivers 4GB of RAM and 120GB local disk is $0.16 per hour. Pricing is 50% off for a limited time as HP establishes its service levels.

The vision for this bundle of services is to enable enterprises of all sizes to build next-generation web applications and services. HP vows to continue to provide rich developer resources and content to support next-generation web service creation that can be shared around the globe. To demonstrate the support HP has garnered for its Converged Cloud portfolio, the company announced nearly 40 companies who support HP Cloud Services. They range from storage, management, and database providers to platform-as-a-service partners.

Some view this announcement as a debutante party for the OpenStack technology initiative, which is open-sourced-based architecture that has been designed to ensure no vendor lock-in. OpenStack includes a full stack of tools for developers to develop code faster, access a partner ecosystem, and receive personalized customer support. OpenStack has some strong supporters, including IBM and Red Hat. Co-founder of OpenStack, Rackspace, made its OpenStack cloud generally available on May 1.

The interest and support that many industry leaders like HP are giving to OpenStack is evidence that Amazon Web services are becoming more of a threat in the enterprise cloud market. As an indication that Amazon is heading straight for the enterprise, Amazon Web Services have been racking up certificates as an infrastructure provider for SAP software. VMWare also is a contender, with its own cloud offering, powered by vSphere, and Tier 3 has an enterprise-grade cloud offering as well. And, Microsoft and Apple cannot be forgotten in this cloud mix. Clearly, the cloud is becoming quite crowded with offerings, and many of them are heading straight for the enterprise, much to the dismay of enterprise infrastructure computing leaders like IBM, HP, Oracle.

Based on what I’ve seen with cloud adoption in the enterprise, it is still a hard sell to convince IT leaders of major companies to put their prized data and applications out on the public cloud. Private clouds appear to be more palatable to the security concerns of IT executives. In recent posts, I’ve covered IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio of private-cloud offerings, which is gaining ground in the enterprise space. [LINKS]

Clearly, HP and other industry leaders see the future in cloud computing. There is no doubt that cloud is consuming vendors’ attention, and it remains to be seen how cloud will play out in the enterprise. There is no doubt that cloud has the potential to be transformative, but it still remains to be seen what the best model for cloud adoption in the enterprise will be. Focusing on an open-source development environment that avoids vendor lock-in is a valiant effort. Time will tell if it can live up to its promise.