HP has made it no secret that it plans to storm the public cloud computing space with a host of products and services in the very near future, but one HP exec showed the company's cloud hand in a LinkedIn update that gave details of where HP's taking its public cloud play.
Scott McClellan, HP's vice president and chief technologist of cloud services, added more detail to the massive public cloud proclamation HP made this year in which CEO Leo Apotheker said that the HP would be a public cloud giant and would offer its own public cloud. McClellan is responsible for driving the technical strategy, architecture and business direction as a co-founder for HP Cloud Services.
McClellan, an HP staffer since the mid-1980s, shared the details on his public LinkedIn profile. While the information has since been removed, The Register caught the mishap and published the plans.
According to McClellan's update, HP plans to launch an "object storage" service that the company built from scratch, which is likely a data storage offering similar to Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3). HP plans for a "compute," "networking," and "block storage" service that McClellan wrote is an "innovative and highly differentiated approach to 'cloud computing' – a declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management; and common/shared services that offer user management, key management, identity management and federation, authentication, authorization, auditing, billing and metering and more.
Additionally, McClellan wrote on his LinkedIn page, that HP is creating a Web site and developer suite that will offer APIs and language bindings for Java, Ruby and other open source languages and a fully functional GUI and CLI. HP is also cooking up quality assurance, code and design inspection processes and security and penetration testing as part of its cloud strategy, McClellan wrote.
HP could not be reached for comment as of press time.
McClellan letting HP's cloud cat out of the bag comes as major technology players pump up their public cloud plays. Dell has said that it will be a public cloud colossus in the near term; while IBM has shared plans to boost its public cloud profile.
HP, however, said it has the perfect public cloud formula to best its competition. The cloud strategy laid out by Apotheker is a three-pronged cloud assault. First, the company plans to help customers transition to the cloud and build cloud infrastructures; it is working on a cloud platform; and is building an open cloud marketplace and prepping a cloud ecosystem.
HP's cloud push has received high praise from cloud VARs who said it's about time a massive a tech giant hits comes out of the gate with a strong public cloud vision.
