As HP’s new chief settles into his role, he is looking to the Cloud to open up new skies of opportunities for the PC giant.
And it’s not just to PC users CEO Leo Apotheker’s revamped giant will be aiming its Cloud services at – he will also be reaching out to business to help grow its software division, which currently accounts for a very small proportion of its overall business.
The former head of software giant SAP is looking to make HP as leader in the development of infrastructure and platform Cloud services with an open Cloud, which can be easily interpreted by developers.
The Cloud marketplace will include an application store, as well as developer tools and enterprise services and support.
“We’ll provide a single open market that integrates consumer, enterprise and developer services,” he said.
This new service will go head to head against Google’s similar Cloud based offering for SMBs, which, just last week, Optus announced it would be partnering with to provide a Cloud based solution for Australians.
“We see clearly a world in which the impact of Cloud and connectivity is changing not only the user experience, but how individuals, small business and enterprises will consume and leverage information technology,” he said at Hewlett Packard’s summit in San Francisco this week.
He promises to help customer’s make the transition through “hybrid architecture” on his company’s Cloud.
“I happen to know something about software,” he said in a separate interview this week. He also announced every PC with the HP logo “will include the ability to run WebOS,” referring to its self made OS, which will also run on its upcoming TouchPad Tablet, Pre3 business smartphone as well as the Veer.
The Palo Alto tech company already predicts by 2014 the commercial ecosystem will be worth $100 billion by which stage almost half of all information will be either on public or private Clouds.
HP already announced details of commercial Hybrid Delivery Cloud which provides infrastructure consisting of four main parts, including data centres, hardware and software as well as a strategy and financial metrics service for execs.
And the company already has the data centres and infrastructure to manage such a service. “Who but HP could deliver” he quipped.
German born Apotheker also denied it was playing ‘catch up’ to IBM with its new offering, which pits them directly against the rival as well as Microsoft’s Azure service.
“This is a huge market,” Apotheker said. “It is our customers who are pushing us to create this. There’s a lot of demand for additional cloud services.”
