HP to launch public cloud service
March 16, 2011
Underscoring that cloud computing will be integral to its strategy moving forward, Hewlett-Packard Co. plans to launch a public cloud service, company CEO Leo Apotheker said Monday at the company’s annual analyst meeting.
The cloud, connectivity and software are integral to HP’s strategy, Apotheker told analysts at the HP Summit 2011 event held in San Francisco. It was the first public appearance by Apotheker since he became CEO more than four months ago.
Observers have eagerly awaited Apotheker’s remarks. Since taking over the top spot at HP after the abrupt departure of former CEO Mark Hurd, Apotheker has avoided public statements regarding the company’s future strategy. Indeed, as expected, Apotheker’s key message focused on his desire for HP to march forward into the cloud.
"We intend to be the platform for cloud and connectivity," Apotheker told analysts. "The opportunities in the cloud are extraordinary and we are positioned to lead with our portfolio and to lead with our customers who need a trusted partner to help navigate the journey ahead."
Apotheker talked of a world where end-user devices are context-aware and the cloud becomes a point of convergence between those devices and the datacenter bringing together both personal and business information.
Still, he sees many customers embracing hybrid cloud infrastructures where data resides in datacenters but compute and storage and platform services come from a variety of sources, both internally and externally.
"Different customers will make this journey at different speeds. For many large enterprises, a hybrid environment, that combines traditional private and public cloud will be the pervading technology mode for a long, long time," he said.
HP executives suggested that the company has had this cloud strategy in place for some time. Indeed, the company in late January outlined its enterprise cloud strategy with the launch of its HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute and CloudSystem. With ECS Compute, enterprises will be able to provision their own servers through HP’s outsourcing services, while CloudSystem is a premises-based turnkey cloud offering based on HP’s BladeSystem Matrix hardware.
That said, Apotheker said HP is seeing increasing demand for a public cloud service. The service will initially appear in the form of a storage offering toward the end of this year or early next year, said chief technology officer Shane Robinson. That will be followed by a compute service, he said. Ultimately HP will offer platform-as-a-service.