HP Beefs Up Cloud Portfolio for Telcos

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HP this week rolled out three new on-demand applications designed to make it easier and more cost-effective for telecommunications providers and ISPs to offer cloud-based services to their customers.

In this moribund economy, more and more enterprise customers are embracing the cloud model to shave costs, reduce the time and complexity of bringing new services online and improve their ability to react to business changes on the fly without installing expensive applications and hardware in their datacenters.

According to a recent HP (NYSE: HPQ) survey, 75 percent of CIOs want to invest in more cloud-based systems to increase their organizational flexibility, communicate faster with business and technology partners and to be able to scale those systems up and down to keep pace with changes in the marketplace.

To that end, HP this week unveiled new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings dubbed HP Operations Orchestration and HP Communications as a Service, as well as an update to HP Cloud Assure.

“CIOs understand the potential business benefits of cloud computing but are challenged with how best to manage the risks associated with adoption,” Thomas Hogan, HP’s executive vice president of software and solutions, said in a statement. “The new HP offerings help assess and mitigate those concerns, driving greater business value by breaking down the adoption barriers related to cost and performance.”

HP Operations Orchestration automates the provisioning of services within a company’s existing infrastructure, making it possible to increase capacity through integration with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and other public cloud providers.

HP Communications as a Service is a cloud-based application geared to help service providers offer small and midsized business a variety of services on an outsourced basis with pay-as-you-go pricing. It includes an aggregation platform, four integration communications services and the functionality to offer other on-demand services as they’re built.

And HP Cloud Assure, which was originally launched earlier this year, now adds cost-control features to help cloud customers “right size” their computing footprints to ensure that all their service levels are met at the most optimized and predictable cost.

HP and top competitors CA, IBM and Microsoft have all been making new announcements and forging partnerships to deliver enterprise-class infrastructure management tools to govern and simplify the management of emerging cloud-based applications and services.

“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 IDC analyst Frank Gens. “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,” he added.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.