HP Software endorses the cloud

HAMBURG, GERMANY: At its annual EMEA showcase event in Hamburg, HP makes its cloud intentions clear by announcing accelerated Cloud Computing adoption for businesses and telcos. They made three announcements for businesses and telecommunication service providers to realize the benefits of cloud computing. Of these, HP Operations Orchestration and HP Cloud Assure are essentially updated offerings while HP Communications as a Service (CaaS) is a new offering.

“There is no doubt that the cloud is a disruptive technology, promising enterprises of all sizes the speed and agility of a startup with the resources and scale of an enterprise,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst, IDC. “Adoption, however, is limited by uncertainties surrounding risks and rewards. Customers want assurance and a safe path to cloud adoption that will address potential risks of security, performance and availability, while providing clear return on investment.”

What HP is hoping to provide with the new set of offerings is to enable businesses and service providers to lower barriers and accelerate the time to benefit of cloud computing adoption by expounding the virtues of elasticity, cost control and risk mitigation.

HP announced enhancements to HP Operations Orchestration, which enables customers to seamlessly provision in-house physical infrastructure to the virtual and cloud-based infrastructure environment. This has been made possible with the use of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) services as well as to virtualization technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.

The second enhancement announced was to HP Cloud Assure to help businesses optimize costs of cloud adoption by giving businesses more control of variable costs associated with adopting cloud services. Cloud Assure is delivered as a SaaS and consists of three solutions called HP SiteScope to measure resource utilization, HP Diagnostics for visibility into application code performance and HP Elastic Test to expand / contract the volume of application testing.

To further strengthen their relationship with the telcos, HP has announced a new CaaS offering for the small and medium business segment. The HP CaaS will enable service providers to offer SMBs cloud-based communications services delivered on an outsourced basis and priced as a utility, like electricity.

Using HP CaaS, wireless, wireline and broadband companies can grow the enterprise side of their businesses by providing SMBs with “one-stop shop” outsourcing for four key applications – self-service interactive voice response (IVR), video surveillance, unified communications and IP contact centers. According to a Forrester study commissioned by HP, the market size for these four services alone is estimated to be $6.2 billion by 2014.

Service providers can create attractive bundles that include any or all of the four “as a service” cloud communications solutions, as well as additional solutions from HP or third parties.

“Service providers and their SMB customers both benefit from the efficiencies of the HP CaaS program,” said Ottavio Carparelli, director, Communications and Media Solutions, HP. “Services on demand enable SMBs to lower costs and increase flexibility, while service providers can generate new revenue from SMB customers.”

The foundation of the CaaS program is the new HP Aggregation Platform for SaaS, which acts as a mediation layer between the communications services, the service provider’s operations and business support systems (OSS/ BSS), and the SMB environment.