Hoping to stake a bigger claim in the growing market for cloud computing services, Hewlett-Packard is moving into direct competition with Amazon and other companies that essentially rent computing services to businesses on an as-needed basis.
The move is part of a broader strategy under CEO Meg Whitman to take advantage of the cloud computing trend, in which businesses and consumers are increasingly storing and accessing information and services over the Internet.
HP planned to officially launch its “public cloud” service Tuesday for startups and large organizations that want to use HP’s data centers for a variety of computing tasks. In addition to computing capacity, the service will include software tools that Web-based businesses and other companies can use to build and run programs, and even move programs from their own data centers to HP’s.
Palo Alto-based HP already sells hardware and software for companies to build their own “private clouds” or internal data centers. HP also operates data centers on contract for some customers.
But it hasn’t been a big player in the “public cloud” business, where established competitors include Amazon, Microsoft and other companies, including telecommunications providers like Verizon. IBM and Oracle also have cloud offerings.
“Plenty of people have tried this,” conceded Zorawar “Biri” Singh, an HP senior vice president, “but I don’t think we’re late.” He said HP is offering broad tech expertise at a time when many businesses are just starting to move onto cloud platforms.
Analysts agree that cloud computing is becoming more widely accepted in a variety of industries. The IDC research firm has estimated overall spending on cloud computing will reach $73 billion by 2015.
Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022; follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.
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