Hewlett-Packard has added new services and programs to its Converged Cloud portfolio, including more support for its channel partners, allowing them to offer cloud services to clients across private, public and hybrid clouds.

HP's announcements, made this week at its Discover 2012 conference in Frankfort, Germany, are intended to help enterprise customers and solution providers using HP's Converged Cloud to better manage and deliver services across different cloud environments.

Frances Guida, HP's manager for cloud solutions, said in an interview with CRN Thursday that an HP survey of 500 enterprise customers found that 75 percent of them use cloud services with a mixture of private, public and managed clouds.

[Related: Private Vs. Public Vs. Hybrid: My Cloud's Better Than Yours]

"We feel that what these clients need to cope with in this hybrid environment is continuity across these different environments," Guida said. "We are driving all our products in this direction, and we're building a common technology based on leveraging open technology."

HP's added new features to its HP CloudSystem, which allows HP solution providers to build and manage cloud, and extended existing programs.

For its Cloud Maps program, HP increased the number of templates by 30 percent, adding more than 200 templates to its catalogue with which partners can add programs such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint to their cloud services offerings for customers.

HP CloudSystem is also offering service lifecycle management as well as support for KVM virtual machines and bursting capability, or the ability to tap the full computing capacity of service providers.

CloudSystem has more than 850 customers, the majority of which are served by channel partners, Guida said.

For HP Cloud Service Automation, a management platform for partners to deliver HP cloud services across mixed clouds, HP's reduced the service deployment time from months to minutes, allowing users to manage on-demand application and infrastructure services.

Also announced was the move from beta to general availability of HP Cloud Compute, the company's infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

Guida said Cloud Compute's prices will start at $0.04 per hour, with service-level agreements of at least 99.95 percent, or fewer than 30 minutes downtime per month.

PUBLISHED DEC. 6, 2012