Hewlett-Packard Vies with Other Companies over Cloud Services

Hewlett-Packard recently announced that they are launching a tool which will provide companies access to computing power over the internet. This will be neat substitute to buying expensive servers. This announcement came as a way of competing with Amazon.com Inc for cloud services.

A prototype of this cloud system will be available from May 10. Hewlett -Packard didn’t comment on the prices but stated that they may start at a few pennies for an hour.

Hewlett-Packard is seeking to compete with Amazon and other companies that have used data centers to make headway in cloud computing, including International Business Machines Corp, Rackspace Hosting Inc, Verizon Communications Inc’s Terremark unit and AT&T Inc, said Frank Gens, chief analyst at market- research firm IDC. Cloud computing has become popular because of its convenience and low cost, and Amazon is a leader, Gens said.

“Amazon’s now setting the benchmarks” in terms of pricing and simplicity, Gens said. For established technology vendors such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, “if they can’t compete with that toe-to-toe, they’re really boxing themselves out of a large part of the market.” Forrester Research Inc has estimated that the market for cloud-computing services will reach $61 billion by the end of this year.

“The market for public cloud is large and will continue to grow,” Hewlett-Packard Chief Strategy Officer Bill Veghte said in a telephone interview. Hewlett-Packard’s “converged cloud” is a package of software and other products that will let companies choose from public, private and “managed” cloud services, Veghte said.

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