Las Vegas – HP,(NYSE: HPQ) at its annual Americas Partner Conference, announced details on its Cloud System Partner program for the channel.
According to Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of HP’s Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN), said the program encourages solution providers to build cloud centres of excellence. The Cloud program will also be added to the PartnerOne umbrella program and the channel will be afforded all of the benefits of that program as well.
“Why are we talking about the cloud? Well, we are best positioned in the market and the HP cloud market opportunity is projected to grow to $143 billion by 2013 and our products are here now. The growth is here now for the channel,” Donatelli said.
Another positioning move by HP was to rebrand its BladeSystem Matrix to Cloud System Matrix.
The HP Cloud System has a single service view across hybrid clouds and is made up of not just hardware, but software and services as well. “How do we put the full power of HP together? The Cloud System does that. To be successful in the cloud you need all of it; hardware, software and services,” he added.
The product will also feature applications from several HP alliance partners such as Microsoft, SAP, F5, SAS, Red Hat, Citrix, VMware, Oracle and TIBCO.
Kent MacDonald, vice president of Calgary-based solution provider Long View Systems, said bundled and vetted offerings is exactly what they are looking for because it enables the channel to go to market quicker. Without it Long View would have to develop the solution just with the hardware and with testing it would take longer to get to market.
Donatelli claims that Cloud System Matrix could be up and running in 30 days.
Donatelli said that HP’s cloud approach is to be heterogeneous and to make sure products such as Cloud System works and interoperates with other products. “Our wish is that you buy ours, but we do not dictate to those who build cloud solutions. Others dictate the OS or hardware. With ours if you want to run Hyper V or VMware, Unix, or Windows you can. You can mix and match apps as well,” he said.
The cloud market, Donatelli said, would be slotted in three segments starting with the enterprise. The enterprise segment is a private end user or government type of sale. “They are faced with challenges to get to the cloud because they have their legacy infrastructure in place and they want to build some private clouds,” he said.
The second segment is more of a broad group for service providers, Donatelli said. HP will work with big and small or regional or global players and the customers are traditional businesses, he said.
The final segment will be independent clouds similar to social media players. This area will be filled by large clouds and they do not have virtualization and this opportunity would need different infrastructure.