| By Larry Carvalho |
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| December 2, 2011 08:30 AM EST |
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9,369 |
HP and Microsoft fall under the category of major enterprise technology providers along with Cisco, IBM, Oracle, SAP and VMWare/EMC. With an eye on projected cloud computing revenue growth, they are all looking at ways to expand their cloud computing presence in order to avoid being overtaken by this transformational change.
These two companies made announcements recently that caught my attention (but there are more):
- HP announced the purchase of Vertica followed by embracing OpenStack and CloudFoundry as part of their cloud offerings.
- Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others announced their support of Hadoop
These announcements give open source offerings and enterprise technology providers end-to-end stack support. Open source gives HP a less expensive way of moving into the software market outside the systems management domain. While many customers are wary of open source due to the lack of support, HP can help remove that barrier.
Other avenues of new possibilities are partnerships that enterprise technology providers and domain experts can collaborate together on. Companies like GE are getting into software development as evidenced by their recent win at Norfolk Southern to develop a software system for fleet management and train traffic analytics. GE could build this software on open source supported by HP and together they could deliver a solution with a higher profit margin compared to non-open source platforms.
Cloud computing has transformational potential but open source can make it revolutionary.
Larry Carvalho runs Robust Cloud LLC, an advisory services company helping various ecosystem players develop a strategy to take advantage of cloud computing. As the 2010-12 Instructor of Cloud Expo's popular Cloud Computing Bootcamp, he has already led the bootcamp in New York, Silicon Valley, and Prague, receiving strong positive feedback from attendees about the value gained at these events. Carvalho has facilitated all-day sessions at customer locations to set a clear roadmap and gain consensus among attendees on strategy and product direction. He has participated in multiple discussion panels focused on cloud computing trends at information technology events, and he has delivered all-day cloud computing training to customers in conjunction with CloudCamps. To date, his role has taken him to clients in three continents.
