HP has revealed more details of its public cloud offering, first announced last year, and the emphasis is going to be on new business features.
In an interview with the New York Times, Zorawar Singh, HP's general manager for cloud services, said that the first build of HP's public cloud platform, due out in the next couple of months, would include some integrated SaaS offerings.
He said among the first software applications to be made available would be both structured and unstructured databases, and data analytics as a service. On top of this, he said that HP also planned to provide tools for developers and an apps store.
HP has been developing its service for the past year and has already indicated that the public cloud offering will be heavily based on open source software - the company has been heavily involved in the OpenStack project.
The clear target will be Amazon Web Services but in the interview Singh was reticent to go into detail on the pricing structure, "we are not coming at this at 8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents,'"
However, he also said that HP would not be offering the same self-service model as Amazon but would be offering a more personalised service, a move that may make some cloud purists raise their eyebrows.
