HP is bullish on cloud computing

Dubai: San Jose-based Hewlett-Packard, the world's sixth largest software vendor, has not changed it strategy toward cloud computing following the departure of CEO Leo Apotheker last month, according to Steven Dietch, the company's vice-president for marketing, cloud solution and infrastructure.

Dietch, who was in Dubai yesterday to give the keynote speech at Gitex's Cloud Computing Conference, said that cloud computing, along with connectivity, is still a core element of the company's strategy.

"Our strategy hasn't changed at all regardless of any leadership change," Dietch told Gulf News in an interview. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman took over the top post at HP last month after Apotheker stepped down after a turbulent year that saw HP stock value drop almost 40 per cent.

Dietch also said the company's goal is to dominate the cloud computing market.

"We're the number one IT vendor on the planet today," he said. "We have no intention other than to be the number one in cloud."

Dietch said the company's strategy revolves around offering simplified solutions that combine HP's experience in servers, networking and storage, and management software and bring those together in an integrated system to deliver a private cloud solution.

"Last year we realised that most comparable or competitive solution in the markets were perpetuating the problems that most customers have today," he said, "which is that most customers have a very fragmented IT environment, which is very complex, siloed, expensive, hard to manage. It's the perpetuation of what you might call IT sprawl."

Private clouds differ from public cloud in that it is designed only for the use of the organisation that owns it. Unlike a public cloud, it requires the company to invest in hardware, software and IT staff, although Dietch said a private cloud should be more flexible and efficient than a traditional IT system.

Dietch said HP is working with those partners to automatically place services such as web apps, ERP, CRM, SaaS and database services into their private cloud offerings.

"If a customer needs management software, or security software, they can go to HP today and rent that software from one of partner service providers."

Competition

He said that offering HP's own software in the same environment as the company's partners will lead to competition between HP and its partners.

"In software vendors, we already compete," he said. "Competition in this particular environment is inevitable. I'm not sure that you can find an industry in IT where there isn't competition between partners."

Dietch said that in the region, there is a myth or a perception that North America or Europe are far ahead, that may not always be the case, he said.

"People tend to believe that they're behind… That's not that case," he said. "We can tell you as people who are moving into the next generation of IT solutions cloud, people here are not that far behind."