By Heena Jhingan
Hewlett-Packard is extending its commitment to OpenStack technology and hybrid IT delivery—spanning traditional IT, public, private and managed clouds, for this the company plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next two years on cloud-related product and engineering initiatives, professional services.
Speaking on the sidelines of the launch of the HP Helion, a portfolio of cloud products and services that enable organisations to build, manage and consume workloads in hybrid IT environments, Ramachandran V, Director, Sales, Cloud Division, HP APJ, said “Today, a single cloud delivery model is not enough. The reality is enterprise IT lives in a hybrid world.”
Stressing Asia Pacific is an important market for HP he said out of over 2000 customers of HP cloud, a third of them are in Asia Pacific. He said that HP’s cloud is growing 60% y-o-y globally and nearly 37% of the Fortune 100 companies run on HP’s converged cloud, adding that Essar, Adiyta Birla, Sify and Biocon are some of HP’s cloud customers in India.
Aman Neil Dokania, VP and GM, Cloud Division, HP APJ said the company is committed to OpenStack.. The new Helion brand will include HP’s integrated cloud solutions, OpenStack software offerings, cloud software and infrastructure, managed services, public cloud and SaaS and professional services around cloud computing.
HP Helion OpenStack based cloud services will be made available globally via HP’s partner network of more than 110 service providers worldwide and in HP data centers. It operates more than 80 data centers in 27 countries. It plans to provide OpenStack based public cloud services in 20 data centers worldwide over the next 18 months.
Dokania said the HP Helion OpenStack Community Edition is now available for developers, customers, and technologists interested in evaluating, developing, and deploying a private cloud based on OpenStack. The edition comes with 24×7 support and updates for it will be available every six weeks. “This is the kind of speed that the enterprises today are looking at,” he added.
On the company’s plan to set up public cloud in Asia Pacific, he said, “We have cloud set up in the US. As of now we will continue to work with service providers to service customers in the other markets and I believe Helion offerings will help us do that more seamlessly.”