As the IT major announced its Cloud consultation portfolio, Mehak Chawla probes into its service offerings and the potential market for the same
Now that the advantages of hopping on to the Cloud are no longer in the dark, many companies are contemplating an active roadmap for leaping on to the Cloud bandwagon. However, creating a roadmap is often more complex than it appears. Infrastructure consolidation, application readiness, transition to IT as a Service delivery model, consistency and reliability are some of the factors that need to be probed once the intention to move to the Cloud is unanimously decided upon.
In order to help organizations sort out these dilemmas, HP has announced its Cloud consulting services; as of now its a portfolio of seven service mixes.
The primary factor behind the strategic move is the complexity that has seeped into every Cloud implementation. What the IT giant is looking at is charting a way out for an organization that has aspirations of a Cloudy nature and is, at the same time, grappling with BYOD, mobility and big data analysis.
“IT users of the future will consume apps from a catalog,” remarked Lakshmi Narayan Rao, National Manager, Cloud Consulting Services, HP India. To ensure the seamless delivery of applications in that scenario, an organization would need to traverse and transform from an optimization phase to service phase. HP is looking to guide organizations in this endeavor.
The services
HP’s Cloud consultation services start with a Discovery Workshop and include other modules like Cloud Gap Analysis, Cloud Workload Analysis, Engineering Cloud Services etc.
It has also come with a Cloud capacity model that, according to Rao, is patent pending and is exclusive IP that it is bringing to its customers through these consultation services.
“Prima facie we are helping customers answer the question, ‘How does the journey to the Cloud happen?’. A lot of CIOs are on the cusp between considering and deploying and we are stepping in to usher them into the deployment cycle,” said Rao.
Cloud consultation services will help customers decide upon the model to opt for, apps to keep in their traditional IT setup and how to handle control and security aspects within the Cloud. The services are already available in the Indian market.
“Hybrid delivery models are the way of the future,” Rao said. HP is going to cater to organizations that are deploying virtualization and converged infrastructure but are unsure of the Cloud model or models that they want to adopt.
The Government is also being touted as an attractive segment and, given HP’s success rate in hardware, its hopes are high on being able to cross-sell these services as governments across India are contemplating using the Cloud as a means to deliver G2C services. Rao revealed that, as of now, there are no plans to tweak the portfolio exclusively for the government sector.
Only for Private?
The private Cloud is big in India but there is plenty of hope for the Public Cloud as well. However, it seems like HP’s consulting services, as of now, are only focused on organizations that are in the planning stages of implementing a private cloud.
The prime logic behind this is that, in the case of an enterprise that’s contemplating a public Cloud, it is quite likely that it will avail of these consulting services from its service provider. This also applies to a managed private Cloud scenario.
The other factor that could play a part is the cost associated with these services. The general $50,000 to $400,000 price bracket that Rao gave for these consultation services is hardly likely to appeal to those contemplating the low cost, OPEX-based public Cloud.
Rao countered that consulting services would aid organizations in making a business case and evaluating the Cloud delivery model among public, private or hybrid that suited their needs given their current IT stack.
“We are positioning ourselves right at the beginning of the Cloud proposition. We provide suitability analysis and that comes before an organization has decided on the service model to adopt,” said Rao.
Rao was also of the opinion that making the right choice with respect to IT solutions was becoming a weighty issue for India Inc. and that is why the time for such services was ripe.
Overlap with DC consulting
HP already has a strong presence in India in the data center consulting space. Since almost all data centers being set up today have Cloud preparedness as the biggest criteria, there is a strong possibility of these two domains overlapping.
Apparently, data center consulting is mostly about hardware optimization and Cloud consulting is going to bring additional value to the table by taking into consideration application delivery and Cloud servicing and maintenance models.
Cross-selling
Given its firmly rooted footprint in data center hardware equipment and a fairly good stronghold in the services market, it is a no-brainer that synergies across internal HP groups are going to see some cross-selling taking place.
Though there is no readily available model, Rao said that a partner-driven approach was going to be the centerpiece of the Cloud consulting portfolio.
HP would also be looking to target its wide customer base for the newly announced services. Having made its mobility ambitions clearer recently, we may see HP positioning itself as an end-to-end, one stop shop for Cloud delivery.
HP promises to “deliver a private Cloud in 30 days.” It is confident that these consultation services can turn into Cloud delivery deals with some customers. So far, Rao said that a couple of BFSI, engineering and product development enterprises had already availed or were in the process of availing of these services.
