Last week I was invited to the HP Tech Day in HP’s campus in Houston to learn and hear more about the giant’s cloud offering. I appreciate HP and Ivy very much for the invitation and for a great event where I was able to learn more and see these clouds in real. I had the privilege to meet savvy and professional guys. It is always great to see people who are enthusiastic on their jobs and are proud of their company. Let me share with you HP’s cloud from my point of view.

The EcoPOD
HP’s guys took me and a my fellow bloggers on a great journey inside HP’s cloud. The most fascinating adventure from me was the HP EcoPOD, an out-of-the-box, ready-made hosting/cloud infrastructure creature. The finalization of the product seems to be a perfect art and with no doubt HP is still a great infrastructure market leader. The Ecopod units serves IaaS providers, huge enterprises and mega websites. The investment of buying this ready-made bank of servers can be stretched from 3 to 5 years commitment so you can actually consider that as a subscription based service. The HP private cloud offering ruled the tech day including support for bursting internally or over to a public cloud, supported by Saavis. Read more about HP’s cloud bursting on TechTalk by Philip Sellers

The Cloud In HP’s Cloud
The second part of the IaaS is the software for provisioning, maintaining and controlling of the cloud resources. For that matter HP conduct a several hours of demonstration of its CloudSystem product. Once the cloud infrastructure deployed, the enterprise can provision the virtual resources, orchestrate and create a catalog of app stacks utilizing the CloudSystem. One of the main features of the platform is the Cloud Maps (I really love the name) that enables the enterprise’ IT to plan and create new app stacks or even import ready-made ones straight from the HP web portal. The UI/UX is very compelling though the management capabilities are very basic. I am not sure that I saw a real cloud environment but an upgraded virtualization control and provisioning application. Following my debates on that I was told that there are some implementations of an elastic environment using custom adjustments. HP also revealed that they are working on a OpenStack implementation though I wasn’t convinced enough to believe that there are serious plans for this matter. Due to the lack of out-of-the-box features such as auto-scaling and elasticity as well as the lack of a real cloud perception that a server is just one atomic unit, I still wonder where is the cloud in HP’s cloud ?

On a “cloud security” session, I raised a basic cloud security issue, where the enterprise need to be able to maintain SSO and IAM solutions to all its applications’ portfolio including the SaaS ones. I asked to know if HP support that kind of features or plan to do so in the future. The HP response was not satisfying and led me to think again about the extreme separation between the infrastructure and the applications that the cloud brought. The answer I anticipated to hear was really simple: As an IaaS provider, HP focuses on the internal network security and the access to the on-premise physical and virtual resources. The SaaS players have the responsibility to provide extensions that integrate with the enterprise private cloud and support issues such as SSO.
It is an evident that the cloud brought the need to re-position the traditional IT vendor offerings and make sure these are related to the specific cloud layer (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS), otherwise it is a confusing play that presents a great risk to the business future.
Conclusion
It is clear that this veteran market leader as other IT giants finds itself segmented into a new definition as an IaaS vendor. The giant struggles getting into a leadership position in this emerging market as it is surrounded by a great competition coming from old competitors such as IBM or Oracle. Furthermore I think that a greater competition comes from the advanced cloud vendors such as Amazon, Rackspace, Salesforce and more others that already taking a great market share. I find it exciting to watch the market evolves, how new business threats are born and how the industry giants pushing hard to find their golden path all over again.