Hewlett-Packard is aiming to capitalize on a coming cloud computing shift from delivering small, consumer-focused services to sustaining secure and reliable enterprise-scale workloads, HP's cloud chief said Wednesday.
"One of the challenges right now is getting to a true, open, scalable, integrated cloud, and an ecosystem around that for the enterprise," Biri Singh, senior vice president and general manager for HP Cloud Services, said in a keynote address Wednesday at the OpenStack Design Summit and Conference in San Diego.
Singh outlined a current cloud environment in which small companies and startups have been able to develop programs that can run as small cloud server workloads and accommodate growing demand brought on by the use of mobile devices in the workplace, the BYOD trend.
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But, enterprises have delayed moving to the cloud due to security and availability concerns. As a result, businesses have put off IT spending, creating pent up demand for technology.
"Startups and SMBs have been well-served, with startups mostly running infrastructure on AWS [Amazon Web Services]," Singh said. "There is a lot of sandbox IT, but we are not seeing heavy, scaled production IT [in the cloud] yet.
"But, converged infrastructure, modified data centers, analytics and databases [in the cloud] are still a work in progress," Singh said. "For us, this is critical. How do we make it real? It's all about getting to production workloads."
To address this issue, Hewlett-Packard's goal is to develop a full stack of cloud services that can ensure seamless transition to the cloud, with service-level agreements (SLAs), management, provisioning and orchestration, Singh said.
The company will continue to work with the OpenStack community as well as other open-source initiatives and will work with vendor partners to fill its cloud platform.
"The HP cloud is not just about infrastructure," Singh said, "We will be delivering the full stack"
PUBLISHED OCT. 17, 2012
