Cloud Innovation of the Year: HP - Converged Cloud |
All service providers, from telcos to IT hosting firms, are trying to keep pace with the double-digit market growth for cloud services – particularly to support early-adopter SMB customers. IDC predicts service providers spending this year will grow over 30% for IT hardware, software and services to deliver cloud services.
Service providers are looking for strong partnerships to help them prioritize and accelerate the delivery of the right services. In the cloud services arena HP has once again excelled, coming out on top in the Cloud Innovation category for its Converged Cloud, which it says is the industry’s first hybrid delivery approach and portfolio based on a common architecture spanning traditional IT, private, managed and public clouds.
Engineered for the enterprise, the company says Converged Cloud extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, applications and data sources.
HP’s Converged Cloud portfolio helps customers do three fundamental things: build, manage and secure cloud environments across all models (public, private, managed, traditional), consume off-premise cloud services and provide professional services to guide customers on the journey to the converged cloud.
“To compete with rivals communications service providers must use new technologies like cloud to build new businesses,” said David Sliter, VP and GM of Communications, Media and Entertainment Solutions at HP Enterprise Services. “Our CloudSystem Service Provider enables CSPs to expand their enterprise businesses with ‘as-a-service’ offerings that help customers operate more efficiently.”
CloudSystem Service Provider (CSSP) is one of HP’s Converged Cloud solutions.
Sliter says the solutions can help telcos scale-up or scale-out service offerings in minutes compared to weeks. “Solutions such as our CSSP and Cloud Services Enablement offer new cloud infrastructure and services to get to market quickly without disturbing the data center.”
Key customers for its cloud offerings include TelstraClear in New Zealand, Bharti Airtel and TurkCell. TelstraClear wanted to provide managed IT services to business customers from the cloud and develop innovative offerings with a roadmap to higher-value services. HP’s CSSP allows the telco to speed up the launch of new cloud services by avoiding time consuming internal change control processes. CSSP also allowed TelstraClear to create a pure “as a service” commercial model while overcoming budget constraints by moving to a pay-per-use model.
Bharti chose HP’s Cloud Enablement Platform to introduce a marketplace portal that provides SaaS and IaaS services to business customers. The platform gives Bharti the ability to monetize many cloud services simultaneously through a single platform investment as well as optimize its IT costs and organizational agility via on-demand capacity upgrades.
HP manages the entire cloud solution deployed in Bharti’s data center.
The tier 1 operator in Turkey deployed CSSP to lower its risks and capex requirements to move into IaaS and CaaS.
Why they won
This innovation is about flexibility and reducing complexity. Based on a single architecture, HP’s Converged Cloud offers companies a seamless path to future hybrid cloud operations. For the second year HP has demonstrated leadership in cloud innovation and gets extra credit for its “open” approach.
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