HP Announces Broad Initiative for Computing; Will Wear Many Hats as Provider of Hardware, and Services February 01, 2011 - IDC Link

By: Crawford Del Prete; Jean Bozman; Gard Little

HP recently announced a broad-based cloud initiative to address the rapidly evolving cloud-computing market opportunity across multiple markets: servers, storage, networking, software and services. It is a nuanced strategy that addresses direct sales of products and services to customers for cloud installations; indirect sales through channel partners; and partnerships with — and sales to — cloud services providers. The aim is to speed the deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds, leveraging HP products and services to do so.

Building and managing cloud infrastructure and apps are very different from building traditional infrastructure and apps — often by deploying rack-dense servers and cloud-optimized servers and blades. Most of today's cloud deployments are for scale-out servers, and different kinds of software support those scale-out deployments, including support for grids and clusters that link individual servers into a "logical" system. In the future, more scalable servers may be added to the mix to provide back-end and data warehouse services, via the cloud.

Recognizing that many customers don't have the in-house IT skill-sets to launch cloud services that blend traditional IT with pay-as-you-go services from cloud service providers, HP announced a series of product and services offerings, like its new "Build, Consume, Manage and Transform" framework, to work with customers to do just that.

The portfolio of cloud-focused services includes the following, which are aimed at building, deploying and enabling cloud-services access:

· Transformation Workshops: HP is offering the HP Cloud Discovery Workshop to customers that want to evaluate all elements of their cloud strategy: from the customer's existing datacenter footprint, to sourcing strategies, governance, security, service management, and building a private cloud.

· Application Modernization Services: Traditional applications need to be modified to take advantage of cloud services. They weren't designed to work with cloud services, and so these applications will need to be adapted by IT, or by HP (via services), to work with public, private and hybrid clouds (hybrids combine aspects of private and public clouds).

· HP Cloud Roadmap and Design Services. These HP services address creation of a service catalog that lists all cloud services available to end-users. The service catalog is often accessed through a portal devoted to services — and embedded software determines which servers should take the incoming requests from end-users, based on the applications accessed, and the SLAs required on a workload-by-workload basis. HP will offer hardware, software and services to work with customers building out cloud infrastructure.

· HP Cloud-Enabled Infrastructure Products. HP has been offering storage and servers and system management software for a long time, but is offering new services to familiarize customers with these products, and how to apply them to public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. To this, HP has added a Cloud Discovery Workshop.

- 1- · HP Services Focused on Security and Availability. IDC's cloud computing customer-based studies repeatedly show that security and availability are top-of-mind considerations for cloud deployments — and that these two attributes must be addressed by all cloud providers for enterprise workloads.

· Governance/Compliance Services Workshops: Private cloud solutions will demand adherence to governmental regulation and compliance with policies before enterprise workloads are approved for cloud delivery.

Cloud Computing Infrastructure for New Build-Outs

Regarding infrastructure, HP will offer the building blocks for cloud computing — as it has in previous announcements. This includes the entire hardware/software portfolio for cloud-enablement: server products, storage products, networking products, systems management software — all in addition to the cloud-enablement services.

IDC believes that HP has already been clear about its offerings for converged infrastructure (CI), which will be the foundation for many cloud build-outs, combining servers, storage and networking resources.

However, HP has aligned new offerings around the cloud-enablement opportunity. HP announced a number of hybrid-delivery cloud-computing solutions, including: HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute; HP CloudSystem; HP Cloud Maps; HP Cloud Discovery Workshop; and a video that describes the full portfolio of cloud solutions offerings.

Specifics include:

· HP Enterprise Cloud Services. These are services supporting private cloud deployments with specified levels for performance, service levels, security, availability and privacy.

· HP CloudSystem. This offering is an integrated system that allows customers to build, manage and consume services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments.

· Support for HP CloudMaps. CloudMaps provide pre-configured catalog "objects" that can be leveraged to populate a services catalog, tapping infrastructure and application resources hosted by cloud computing.

IDC Analysis

IDC believes this is a thoughtful, mature approach to cloud computing, which has been in its nascent stages in 2008–2010. It builds on earlier cloud-computing announcements made by HP. Now, the hard work of making cloud computing useful to a range of organizations will begin — addressing both enterprises and SMB organizations that plan to reduce planning/consideration/deployment cycles by accessing cloud services from outside providers. The next wave of cloud computing, particularly in private and hybrid clouds, will be able to provide enterprise-class services to large organizations, with the same levels of performance, availability and security that customers would expect from in-house IT infrastructure.

Therefore, key to the success of this HP initiative will be ensuring that the cloud services support enough security, availability (via SLAs) and performance, as well as contractual safeguards to meet governmental regulations for compliance and fiduciary responsibilities.

Clearly, the first wave of cloud was about supporting application development, and accessing for-fee, pay- as-you-go computing services. Now, customers are expecting more built-in guarantees from their cloud service provider, regarding security, availability and system performance.

- 2- HP will be focusing on hybrid cloud delivery as the main approach for transformation of its clients' businesses. HP CloudSystem seeks to integrate private and public cloud applications, along with traditional legacy IT, into a hybrid environment. This focus is a natural extension of HP's strength in managing complex, heterogeneous IT environments for clients, and it reminds clients and prospects that HP is a credible alternative to manage, secure and orchestrate cloud environments on behalf of customers.

Wearing Many "Hats" as a Cloud Computing Provider

HP has to make it clear that it will be playing many roles in the realm of cloud computing — and so will "wear many hats" as customers engage with HP for parts of the solution set, depending on their IT situation, IT skill-sets, and cloud-computing requirements. IDC believes that a modular, granular approach to selling cloud-computing enablement into the worldwide marketplace is a good one, but it will be absolutely essential for HP to be clear and crisp about what it is offering — and about the intended audience for each solution or service.

HP has a broad spectrum of components for the total solution-set for cloud computing, but has brought many of them to market in separate announcements. This time, HP tackled a bigger communications challenge — getting the full depth and breadth of HP products and services out into the marketplace via this cloud computing initiative launch.

Competitive Analysis

Given the global reach and deep technology portfolios of IBM and Oracle, IDC believes that these two systems vendors will provide the most hard-fought competition to HP's broad-based cloud initiative. That's why it will be important for HP to be clear about its marketing messages around cloud computing, and to differentiate its offerings, tailoring them to address specific segments within the overall customer base.

Regarding the issue of "co-opetition" — it is inevitable in the cloud computing space, not only for HP, but also for its competitors. The days of selling vendor hardware as a platform for all possible ISVs and third- party providers are, largely, gone, due to the trends toward leveraging converged infrastructure for faster deployment and greater operational efficiency.

Competitors in the same market spaces for cloud computing enablement and services include these system vendors:

· IBM, which launched a number of products and services in recent years including the "Blue Cloud" for directly provided cloud services; the x86 (blades and rack), Power (blades and rack) and IBM System z mainframe servers; storage-oriented cloud services for data protection; IBM Tivoli system management software and Rational development tools for cloud-enablement of applications.

· Oracle, which offers Exalogic systems for cloud computing enablement for app-serving and accessing multiple computing tiers; Oracle SaaS services for on-demand ERP and CRM services, and IT infrastructure products in the form of servers, storage, and systems software, along with applications that run on the systems. Oracle's cloud computing strategy has blossomed in 2010, following a period in which Oracle didn't openly discuss its cloud computing initiatives, but its Exadata V2 and Exalogic systems, announced in 2010, can also support private clouds, with the Exadata supporting OLTP, data warehouse, business intelligence and large scalable .

· Dell Computer, which offers cloud-optimized servers, and services to speed cloud computing deployments. Dell has focused on producing new cloud-optimized server designs that address emerging needs of cloud-services providers, and of IT organizations deploying private clouds. It gained input for those designs through its DCS group.

· Fujitsu, which sells cloud-enablement hardware, software and services delivered from several sites worldwide (e.g., Dallas; Sunnyvale, CA; and Tokyo). Fujitsu's initiative has been active for more than two

- 3- years, but its ecosystem is smaller than that of HP, with regard to worldwide channel resellers and total number of ecosystem partners.

· Cisco, the newest entrant in the worldwide server market, has already said that its highly virtualized UCS offering will be a converged infrastructure platform that supports cloud computing. Cisco is working with EMC and VMware to expand the UCS-based solutions infrastructure. But Cisco will need to engage more outside partners to bring the entire solution to market than will HP, which makes more of the individual cloud-enablement "pieces" in-house, except for packaged applications.

Each of these vendors has its own "take" on cloud computing — offering its own blend of products and services, and evolving these over time to meet emerging demands. Dell Computer famously taps its DCS group of large cloud-services providers for emerging requirements for next-gen servers. HP has done the same with its largest cloud-computing customers, giving rise to the SC line of rack-dense servers and HP microserver designs.

Conclusions

HP is introducing a comprehensive, well-thought-out portfolio of products and services designed to accelerate deployments of cloud computing solutions for public, private and "hybrid" clouds.

Given the continuing economic recovery, these solutions will likely draw interest from IT organizations worldwide, because they offer a way to deploy new systems into the field more rapidly — and a way to tie their existing IT infrastructure into providers' cloud services more efficiently. Importantly, HP is also leveraging its HP Financial Services arm to provide funding for new cloud-computing build-outs by IT organizations and cloud providers.

The experience set of IT skills around cloud computing is "lumpy" among the customer base — that is, some large enterprises are already deeply on the path to leverage cloud computing, while many others haven’t left the starting line. Many types of customers, from SMBs to divisions of large companies, could benefit greatly by tapping cloud services provided by others but need to know how to get their cloud strategy off the ground while avoiding a costly learning curve to do so.

By creating a portfolio of products and services that build the cloud — and services to be delivered via the cloud — and by sharpening its marketing messages, HP is making a strong play to be considered as a top-line vendor to enable cloud computing. While comprehensive in its scope, HP will need to work hard to make sure that each of the respective target customers understands where HP fits in the increasingly complex cloud universe. For example, HP needs to emphasize why it should be selected as the cloud service orchestrator or migration lead, based on either the totality of its offerings or the superiority of its approach.

Although HP will not be alone as a cloud computing provider, it is positioned as a broad-based cloud- computing supplier. Interestingly, as HP enters this new market, it gains new competitors that just yesterday were (and still are) customers. Just another day in an increasingly complex IT marketplace.

Subscriptions Covered: Enterprise Servers: Technology Markets, Cloud Strategies in Practice, Cloud Services: Global Overview, Cloud Services: The Professional Services Opportunity

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