HP offers $2bn for cloud expansion

eWeek.

The idea is to help businesses not only reach their cloud computing goals, but also to become agile enough to handle the various delivery solutions, whether from public, private or hybrid clouds, or from traditional data centres, says HP.

This flexibility is crucial because cloud computing is growing rapidly, according to Jan Zadak, executive VP of enterprise sales and marketing for HP.

The company has created a channel partner programme for cloud computing designed to enable all of its indirect channel partners to capitalise on the growing cloud computing opportunity, the company announced at its Discover conference, says Channel Insider.

The new HP CloudAgile programme spans the entire HP enterprise portfolio of products, including CloudSystem, HP's cloud platform unveiled earlier this year and received some enhancements at HP Discover.

HP said it plans to use the CloudAgile programme to motivate its internal sales teams to collaborate with its more than 143 000 channel partners around the world on getting cloud infrastructure and services deployed, according to Steve Dietch, VP of cloud solutions and infrastructure at HP.

“We're going to allow customers to dynamically provision and harness IT resources, bursting and grabbing them from an external services provider,” Dietch said, writes ZDNet.

Additionally, if “there are security or compliance concerns they'll be able to burst internally as well.”

Administrators can choose the types of clouds they want their applications to deal with through a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows them to visually lay out the structure of their cloud.