Hewlett-Packard released a private, beta cloud service that includes both computing and storage capabilities on Wednesday.
HP said it will open HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage to developers for testing and feedback, all of which is being run on HP’s network hardware. In July, the company announced a partnership with OpenStack, an open source cloud infrastructure project, and OpenStack an unspecified role in the new service. The service marks the computing giant’s first large foray into the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market.
A survey in May by IBM of more than 3,000 chief information officers showed that 60 percent of them planned on embracing cloud computing within the next five years as means to grow their business.
HP's entree into cloud computing is a logical move considering its massive server business, but that doesn’t mean it will be a success. Most firms still don't understand the difference between hosting and cloud computing, says Daryl Plummer, a fellow at Gartner.
"The question is how serious HP is," he said to Wired over the phone. "With all turmoil recently, a lot of people are pretty worried that HP still doesn't know where it's going."
The new offering from HP is a bright spot in an otherwise turbulent month of public relations. In August, the company announced it would discontinue the TouchPad tablet, which cast the future of webOS in doubt, a mobile operating system HP bought just in April for $1.2 billion.
What’s more, the future of HP’s Personal Systems Division (PSG) – which makes the company’s PCs and is worth roughly $40 billion – has turned murky. First, CEO Leo Apotheker hinted that HP may put the division up for sale. After a flurry of rumors of potential suitors, none of which seemed overly interested, HP changed its tune and said in a company memo that it would like to spin the division off into a separate company.
The decision to spin it off is now pending a board of directors vote, scheduled to happen later this year. While PSG is one of the most successful PC makers in the market today, its low margins are not in line with HP’s high-margin divisions like printers and servers.
"We believe that by working closely with the developer community and combining the best open source technologies with HP’s hardware and software portfolio, we can create the right mix of capabilities that deliver best customer experience," Emil Sayegh, HP's vice president of cloud services, said in a post on the company's website.
