Unveiling new cloud offerings today

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Today HP is announcing a few offerings building upon the Instant-On Enterprise focus from last fall. There are websites with all the details, but I thought I’d provide the highlights from my perspective.

The announcements introduce the following components:

• HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute with the focus on a more agile way of accessing compute resources for organizations. It lets organizations scale their cloud capacity as much as they like within a range that the customer defines. So there is control as well as flexibility. Enterprises can choose between HP-managed or self-managed server packages – so it is more than just a virtual machine in the cloud (if you want it to be). One goal of this effort is to allow businesses to focus on their core goals like gaining market share, improving customer satisfaction, and growing their bottom line, without having to worry about the infrastructure operational details.
• HP CloudSystem: this offering is a complete integrated system to build, manage and consume services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. It is not just about what is out in the cloud but more of an enterprise integrated approach. This lack of a holistic view has always been a weakness of most cloud offerings (in my opinion). The offerings intelligent resource management capabilities automate the allocation of private and public cloud resources to enable an enterprise to meet cost, performance and compliance goals based on their pre-defined business policies.
• HP Cloud Service Automation is a core management engine for private and public cloud environments. It enables enterprises to manage cloud services with one-touch provisioning and monitoring, include service levels. Too often organizations underestimate the effort required to deploy and manage applications in the cloud. As a result, they often experience costly delays and lose the cloud benefits that they sought in the first place. This tool is focused on addressing these concerns.
• HP Cloud Discovery Workshop is focused on helping an enterprise develop a holistic cloud strategy. It is more of a facilitated exercise where the organization teases out their issues and requirements. By understanding critical success factors, benefits and challenges, it helps organizations make a more informed decision and helps them stay on the right path. It consists of a number of perspectives (or panels) to facilitate discovery. I actually coordinated the creation of the applications panel for this one with a team of folks from HP Enterprise Services.

The overarching theme is to enable organizations to increase their flexibility, visibility and transparent access to a wider range of computing capabilities -- enabling them to free up resources and support other business objectives.