Did you see the news that HP announced their foray into the public cloud space? It is great to see another classical computing giant offer cloud services (Dell, IBM).
The blog post made by Emil Sayegh (VP Cloud Services) included a solid statement of intent:
“…our goal is to provide the next generation of cloud infrastructure, platform services and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, and businesses of all sizes. We recognize that public cloud services should be open and transparent from end-to-end across APIs, infrastructure and software stack.”
This combined with Emil’s heritage as Cloud Computing GM at Rackspace may indicate a stronger desire to compete with AWS rather than the services-heavy IBM. (Side note: an interesting IBM-HP comparison from a couple of years ago.
The biggest challenge will be the software - the further up the cloud stack we go, the more software skills, technology, and experience is required. This has not been HP’s traditional field of strength. Although it will be interesting to see if/how the Autonomy acquisition could fit into the cloud mix. HP’s definitely playing catch-up, so there will likely be more acquisitions along the way.
A big winner for this announcement will be OpenStack. HP announced joining OpenStack in July and is basing part of their cloud solution on the open source technology.
This is all good for Xuropa - the more choice we have at the Infrastructure and Platform layers the better. Our Intelligent Sales Engine™ will happily sit on top of any cloud and enable ISVs to deliver their software as SaaS.
