HP Hybrid Delivery Solutions – Agility Solutions For Cloud Builders

HP Hybrid Delivery Highlights

• Launched a series of IT Services to help Cloud builders
• Its research shows agility is important to business success and technology important for achieving it
• Its reference customers are mainly US-based, with a good number from Asia and Europe
• Its Cloud building activities will no doubt move from service providers to general-business customers as Cloud
  Computing develops
• It will also promote common infrastructure elements for mixing internal and external application provision
• It will also continue offer IaaS and PaaS offerings from its own regional data centres

HP’s Cloud Computing strategy involves providing its customers with tools to build private Clouds, as well as delivering is own Cloud services directly. It recently updated its Cloud Computing offerings by announcing a number of enhanced solutions. Our analyst briefing was addressed by Steve Dietch, Nick van der Zweep and Alan Wilson, whose roles spread from Cloud infrastructure to Industry Standard servers and Technology Services respectively.

Cloud Computing is often a new and complicated subject for IT Managers, many of whom have the development of Cloud Computing on the agenda for the first time in 2011. HP’s Cloud building customers include enterprises who are implementing internal ‘private clouds’, as well as service providers who are using HP technology to deliver their own public and ‘virtual private’ cloud services to their own customers. Cloud Computing offers simplified application usage for ultimate users, but here HP is addressing those who need to get involved in the heavy lifting of building new virtualised architectures.

Services Designed To Make Cloud Builders More Agile

HP’s research has discovered that almost all business and government execs (95% in its survey) believe that agility is important to their organisation’s success and that investments in technology is a key factor to increasing agility. All of which provides the rationale for making agility is a strong theme in HP’s latest Cloud Computing announcements. In particular:

• CloudSystem is an integrated system for building and managing Cloud services across private, public and hybrid Cloud environments; it is built on its Converged Infrastructure and Cloud Automation offerings; new features include ‘dual bursting’ for scaling and provisioning resources; it comes in three sizes – Matrix, Enterprise and Service Provider
• CloudAgile is a programmed designed for service providers, allowing them to hook up with HP’s direct sales force to build Cloud service offerings quickly; it encompasses HP’s full enterprise portfolio (including CloudSystem) and comes in three depths of engagement – Premier (by invitation only), Select (leading providers) and Business (new entrants)
• Within its recently announced Hybrid Delivery services HP includes a number of relevant offerings, including
• Support Services for CloudSystem, which gives customers a single point of accountability, along with automated Remote Support among other features;
• CloudStart services, which extend the features of CloudSystem by focusing on agility issues – in particular by helping to define their initial private Cloud services, implement costing and charge-back and addressing existing security and backup policies;
• It has also launched the Cloud computing curriculum, which provides education support for clients wanting to get up to speed on their newly acquired Cloud investments
• HP is also addressing security issues by introducing Vulnerability Scanning, which scans network nodes (including servers and network devices) for vulnerabilities to prevent
  data loss and unauthorised access; it has also introduced Vulnerability Intelligence, providing customers with information on newly discovered potential threats and allowing them to take corrective action before the system fails
• It has also announced enhancements to its Cloud Services for Communication as a Service (CSE for CaaS) offering, helping Telcoms suppliers offer utility pricing for Cloud services to SMBs

HP’s Growing List Of Cloud Customers

2011 is a year in which Cloud Computing is taking of in a massive way, despite some analysts’ refusal to recognise it as a real revenue opportunity. HP has published a list of its reference customers (see Table 1). While the majority of these are US-based (especially the Cloud services providers), there is a good spattering of European, Indian and Chinese companies.

Table 1 – HP’s Cloud Computing Reference
Customers

Source: ITCandor, July 2011
The large proportion of Telecom and Cloud suppliers in HP’s reference list confirms the coverage of its announced service offerings as well as its international credentials.  In addition to the general references, alatum, Datapipe, Harris, NaviSite, OpSource, shi and Verizon are more specifically reference customers for HP CloudAgile services.

Some Conclusions – Agility Is A Multi-Level Issue

Our research suggests that virtualisation and Cloud Computing itself allow business processes to be automated more quickly than in the past, cutting project implementations from months to weeks, from weeks to days and from days to hours. In most cases the current bottlenecks lie as much in ‘people’ and ‘process’ as in ‘technology’ issues – where networking engineers work at a different speed to application developers, or where new hardware needs to be commissioned for new applications for instance.
By launching these services HP is offering its internal expertise to help customers for whom Cloud building is not as well known – so in a sense its making data centre staff more agile to help them deploy services which in turn improve business agility.
As the market matures so HP’s Cloud building attention will no doubt shift from Cloud service providers and Telecom customers to more general-purpose businesses – helping IT departments turn into internal service providers by adding monitoring, automation and utility charge-backs to their user departments. Simultaneously it will continue to promote common infrastructure designs so large organisations can mix internal and external applications, reducing the need for IT staff to specialise in all of the technology needed to run their corporate applications. Coincidentally it will also create revenues to pay for the investments the service providers are currently making in building Clouds. It will no doubt also continue to build out its own IaaS and PaaS services from the many data centres it owns at a regional level.