HP has announced a new cloud-based service bundle, aimed at the service provider market, as well as enhancing its existing cloud computing solutions.
At its annual Software Universe conference in Hamburg, Germany, the company launched communications as a service (CaaS) for service providers wanting to offer the SME market cloud services, but don't know where to start. The company also enhanced two existing offerings.
Operations Orchestration now has the ability to provision cloud resources from public providers such as Amazon's EC2 in the same way as internal resources, while the company's Cloud Assure has been enhanced.
"There are three big themes of our announcement," said Robin Purohit, HP's VP and GM of Software Products. "The first is elasticity, where customers can flex up or down depending on what they want and paying as they go; the second is controlling costs and not just innovation; and thirdly is to do it properly.
“With any new technology it's easy to experiment, but if you want to integrate your core business processes or services into something like cloud computing, you have to have the automation and the diligence to do it right every time. We want to be a cloud service provider to some specific markets. We also want to help service providers find new profit opportunities in cloud computing."
Steen Lomholt-Thomsen, VP and GM of software solutions, said the company was on a journey that started a number of years ago.
"We have invested more than $7 billion buying companies and capabilities so that we can offer a very broad suite," he said. "As we head into 2010, our portfolio will allow us to access a market that is worth $90 billion - eight times bigger than the market we were able to address five or six years ago."
Lomholt-Thomsen said cloud was the way companies could move more of their budgets out of operations and into innovation.
"We've done a study that shows best-of-breed companies spend 35% of their budgets on innovation and 65% on keeping the lights on. Cloud can be an enabler to let customers invest more in innovation and transform their infrastructure, as well as reducing the cost of it.
“Essentially, customers need to have the speed of a start-up, but with the resources and scale of an enterprise."
Risk and reward
The HP CaaS program will enable service providers to offer the SME market cloud-based communications services, delivered on an outsourced basis and priced like electricity.
CaaS is meant to be a one-stop shop with self-service IVR and video surveillance included from HP, and unified communications and IP contact centres from the company's partners.
"By using HP CaaS from their service provider, SMEs can shift valuable resources from IT to their core business, while becoming more competitive," said Lomholt-Thomsen. "And by helping SMEs reduce complexity and costs, service providers can use HP CaaS to attract and retain customers, create steady income streams and, ultimately, increase overall revenue."
HP Operations Orchestration automates the provisioning of services within the existing infrastructure - whether physical, virtual or cloud-based. Businesses can now seamlessly increase capacity through integration with a “pay as you go” model from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
HP Cloud Assure for cost control provides cloud consumers the assurance that they are optimising cloud costs and are achieving the predictability necessary to budget appropriately. This solution enables cloud consumers to “right-size” their various compute footprints, says HP.
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