Magdy Assem, HP solutions & industry marketing director
HP’s Long March to cloud completion continued at Discovery 2012 in Las Vegas this week, as the company announced of a series of new capabilities to bolster its Converged Cloud portfolio. Over the last year and a half, HP has mounted an impressively persistent campaign to round out its solution offering by extending cloud services for managing infrastructure, applications and data. If HP was later out of the gate with cloud, it has made up for lost time with a steady stream of service enhancements aimed at positioning HP as the vendor of choice for all cloud requirements and all cloud environments. This week’s announcements fall under five broad categories: launch of converged cloud services for the airline industry, new services to help customers build hybrid cloud environments, management solutions for next gen cloud applications, a new remote cloud print solution, and certification training to help close the IT cloud skills gap.
Converged Cloud Services for Airlines is a new integrated platform composed of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS elements. On the software side, HP’s vision for “Intelligent Airline Cloud” combines a travel and reservation solution for
Passenger Services, and a services oriented architecture platform that airline customers can use as the foundation for app development for new products. In addition to this
PaaS, the airline solution draws on HP’s private cloud offering to provide an IaaS platform that airline customers can use to quickly scale computing on-demand as needed.
In building specialty clouds, HP started with the airline industry due to its heritage in this vertical. As Magdy Assem, senior director of solutions and industry marketing at HP explained, with its acquisition of services firm EDS, HP also acquired “a couple of decades of very strong airline specific IP. If you look at the top airlines today, most of them are clients of our own enterprise services business. So we have the IP, we have the capability and we are rethinking, re-architecting to make it a cloud service – and making it available as a private cloud you own yourself, or as a private, managed cloud. We started with the airlines because we know this sector really well.”
