Companies have been talking about cloud computing solutions for a while now. Cloud computing might not be mere hype anymore, but even now, the concept is far from being a consolidated solution. Moving to the cloud is not an easy decision, particularly if one is running the IT department of a big company, where there are a lot of legacy systems. However, it seems to be a one-way trip. Companies, including vendors, are still developing their cloud strategies. While chief information officers are figuring out what — and no longer when — they will move to cloud computing, service providers are customizing their portfolio to include the cloud.
Sometimes the answer has more to do with renaming existing solutions than with designing a whole new product portfolio. Hewlett-Packard is following this path. The company knows that it has to offer cloud solutions, much as its competitors are doing. IBM, for instance, has said cloud computing is one of four key areas on which Big Blue is basing its growth strategy.
Indeed, cloud, social, mobility and an explosion in information were cited by consulting firm Gartner as the new forces that are making it necessary to look differently at business. The trends identified by Gartner are driving companies to reinvent themselves to become more focused on postmodern business, creative destruction and simplicity. The world now is fueled by the explosion in information, collaboration and mobility, enabled by the cloud.
“We see a big change, through which it is not the technology but the information that is changing,” said Carlos Mazon, vice president and country manager for HP Enterprise Services Brazil, during a news conference Nov. 28. “Information is becoming more privileged. So those enterprises who know how to take better advantage of them will be successful.”
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HP is basing its strategy on delivering cloud-based architectures that may allow companies to transform and optimize their environments, Mazon said. “Connectivity and convergence are the major trends of the moment, and we use a software layer to integrate existing and new infrastructures because clients cannot throw away what they have. We have to provide a hybrid model, that combines private and public cloud and which is what enables cloud today.”
HP forecasts the cloud services market will reach U.S. $150 billion in 2014. The company — whose profit in fiscal year 2011 fell 19% from the previous year, to $7.1 billion — aims to grab a share of the market. “Today, the unstructured content drives a whole new challenge, and we have to be prepared for the transformations boosted by information. We are going to differentiate ourselves by the software layer,” Mazon said.
HP is calling its cloud offering infrastructure and platform as a service. Titled ‘Enterprise cloud services’, HP has laid out a roadmap to reach applications layers within three years. Mazon also mentioned a partnership with SAP to deliver its enterprise resource planning as cloud services. The German software giant is looking to go beyond ERP and SAP is driving efforts toward mobile, big data and cloud computing. Indeed, the company is basing its near-term growth on these three pillars, with a goal of achieving U.S. $27.4 billion (20 billion euros) in revenue by 2015.
But what HP has in its cloud portfolio are infrastructure and platform as a service. When I asked whether those two wouldn’t simply amount to an ordinary outsourcing offer, Mazon said that HP considers these as cloud services because of the flexibility of the processing capacity. “IT is a vision of processing in the cloud, in which HP does all management services. ”
HP closed 2011 with its personal systems group accounting for 30% of company’s revenue, followed by services (28%), imaging and printing group (19%); enterprise, servers, storage and networking (17%); financial services and others (3%); and software (3%).
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