This has been a busy time for people watching cloud news as on the one-hand Cisco threw their hat in the cloud ring with a major investment while Google sparked a cloud price war. To help you make sense of what is happening, I thought it made sense to share the insights of Margaret Dawson, Cloud Evangelist at HP.

She says enterprise customers are living in a hybrid world while dealing with apps which live across various environments and in the meantime they have to manage the complexity and security challenges.

She continued that companies don’t want more diversity, they want to map out their apps and workloads to make sure they are in the right places while maintaining common governance, management, control and visibility across environments so as to be more agile. These are the things HP helps companies achieve she explained.

Specifically she outlined what HP is offering in the cloud

1. They are promoting OpenStack as the tech foundation for their hybrid cloud and IT portfolio.
2. Providing enterprise grade – hardened solutions.
3. Providing hybrid solutions – making sure they work together with common management and integration – while using open APIs which don’t need a to retrofit or custom integration.

We then discussed the competitive environment and she had this to say about the public cloud… On price cutting she mentioned this applies to list price on basic services and they are seeing commoditization like other markets. She continued that for developers looking for the cheapest and simplest cloud solutions, these offers are for them. She continued by saying this pricing doesn’t apply to more complex hybrid integrations needing integration or strategic deployments.

Regarding the news of Cisco getting into the space, she mentioned that HP investments are far outshining others and their solutions work across public and private clouds with support for heterogenous environments with profesional and managed services support.

When I asked what else should people should know, she replied, HP is all in in cloud, this fits with our enterprise heritage. She continued, We are here to win, cloud is instrumental in the HP turnaround and we can expect big announcements around our cloud initiatives and OpenStack. In conclusion, she said, “It is going to be an awesome year.”