Xavier Poisson on HP Helion, Cloud 28+ and Europe

It’s been some months since I covered HP’s differentiated approach to Cloud Computing in Europe, so it was great to be able to catch up with Xavier Poisson and his team in Frankfurt last week.

Our Figure, which shows the total revenues of a handful of vendors I think of as ‘cloud native’ demonstrates the imbalance in cloud adoption at the regional level, with the Americas growing far more strongly than EMEA or Asia Pacific. Through working with the European Commission on a number of research projects and setting up Cloud 28+ HP in general – and Xavier in particular – are promoting something different in the EU. I’m sure you’ll want to know what, how and their chances of success.

Insufficient knowledge – not security fears – is the main barrier to cloud adoption in Europe

Xavier quoted Eurostat’s research into cloud computing services in Europe, which found that 20% of enterprises in the EU were using them in 2014. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the main barrier to adoption was not the much-flaunted lack of security, but rather an insufficient knowledge of cloud computing itself – something that’s easier to put right. As we’ll see HP takes an end-to-end approach, which includes its own services, software and hardware reinforced by significant efforts to engage its partners. A ‘late majority’ adopter starting out on the journey to the cloud therefore should find that the HP ecosystem is already prepared to provide cloud components in addition to the on premise solutions it already purchases.

For Xavier everything starts with the application and he reports a major shift amongst HP’s customers from spending on traditional (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Exchange) to ‘cloud native’ ones (Progress, PostgreSQL, mx mendex, Mongo DB, docker, Hadoop for example). His forecast is for new design patterns to account for 17% of the application mix by 2017, which of course implies that the current ration is much smaller. HP is already enjoying strong growth in cloud – it has over 2k private cloud customers in Europe, up from 1k a year ago – and many of them included a provision for software innovation in the RFP.

What’s in the HP Helion portfolio?

HP’s Helion cloud portfolio (see Figure) is heavily leveraged on OpenStack, in which it announced an investment of $1b over a 2-year period last May; ‘we want it to be the operating system of the Open world’, Xavier says. The portfolio includes:

• Platform software – OpenStack 1.1, which is for building Open Source IaaS; Helion Development Platform, which is a PaaS for software developers and based – like IBM BlueMix – on Cloud Foundry, although HP accommodates other methods as well
• Solutions for hybrid compatibility – Cloud Service Automation, which is cloud management software delivered as a standard software install or incorporated into a CloudSystem appliance; Eucalyptus is a recent acquisition for running AWS compatible configurations on premise
• Optimised solutions – Helion CloudSystem, which currently has 2 configurations based on (<32 node) CS200-HC and (<100 blade) CS700x ConvergedSystems); Helion Rack, which is a brand new factory-built private cloud housed in a 42U full-sized rack, priced upwards from $400k and designed for large customers); Helion Content Depot – an OpenStack Swift object storage solution
• Cloud Services – these include HP’s public Cloud (US only) and Managed Cloud offerings, which include Virtual Private (multi-tenant) and Private Cloud (dedicated single tenant) services; its application services span Microsoft Dynamics and Exchange, SAP and Oracle
• Professional Services – HP uses its experience of OpenStack, hybrid cloud and traditional IT to help customers with advisory, strategy, application transformation, design, implementation, support and education services.

It also has an array of partner activities supporting the Helion brand. These include:

• Helion Network – It has signed up 150 telco/service providers around the world to date to a common, global, OpenStack-based network to add to 90 f its own data centers; Xavier refers to this as ‘an archipelago of clouds’
• Helion Ready – certifies ISV applications and SaaS offerings as ‘Enterprise ready’ to be deployed on Helion; HP reports that there are already 32 ISV certified, 22 in progress with another 150 in the pipeline; in total there are 400 applications certified; Xavier thinks ‘we can reach 10k – it just depends on ourselves’
• PartnerOne for Cloud – the reseller partner program, including training, sales and marketing resources and financial incentives
• PartnerOne Service Provider Program – HP has extended PartnerOne to include Service Providers, of whom BT Ignite IT is the sole platinum partner; it currently has 65 gold and 54 silver partners in this program
• Public Cloud Partner Program – VARs, Solutions Partners and Global System Integrators can extend their market reach by integrating Helion elements, for which they receive annual financial incentives; the silver level is for companies who ‘self-serve’ their own Clouds, while gold is for those who engage more deeply with HP’s resources

This is quite a complex set of offerings and programs – especially for those who think of cloud as just a different delivery mechanism. However at least it is possible to get most of what HP offers on a single slide. I find it hard to differentiate between HP’s software, professional service and hardware offerings – used to help others build clouds – and its IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services.

We can’t deny, however that HP is spending a lot of investment money in building Helion offerings, or that it has an international approach. We’ve listed its own data centers by type in the Table.

Table – HP’s main cloud data centers by type and region

Source: ITCandor, 2015 (after HP)

Notes: *I’ve counted 2 data centers as 1 in this column; HP claims to have over 90 Helion data centers in total, including 24 running its Virtual Private cloud and the 8 dual pairs shown above

Cloud 28+ – an EU community connected by a common cloud service catalogue

The second day of our conference was a meeting of Cloud 28+ itself and involved presentations from a number of companies and institutions as well as a workshop session designed to help build the governance of the group. Although still in its infancy, Cloud 28+ is an interesting group: founded and funded up ‘til now by HP, it’s future may be as a non-profit organisation run by its participants, who can be defined in 5 categories (see Figure). Central to the group’s activities is a carefully designed cloud service catalogue – a sophisticated directory of services presented as a kind of ‘dating agency’ from which customers, Service Providers, ISVs and resellers can search for cloud services by country or region. Each service is classified within bands for comparison with a scoring system based on the searchers own Service Level criteria, such as the resilience (99.99%, 99.999%, etc.) and price. An enquiry produces results ranked according to the best fit with these criteria.

The Cloud 28+ attendees numbered 74 people from 55 companies, if we exclude HP and industry analysts like myself (see Figure). These were mainly Telco/Service Providers, Cloud Builders and ISVs, with a smaller number coming from the Public Sector/End User and Reseller categories. In terms of geography the largest number came from Germany – perhaps because the meeting took place in Frankfurt. It was interesting that 7 of the companies were non-EU in origin, coming from Serbia, the Lebanon and the USA. Xavier pointed out that there was interest in Japan, Latin America and other regions in creating their own ‘Cloud x’ communities in time.

Xavier vision for Cloud 28+ is a ‘cloud of clouds for Europe, secured locally’. It allows its users to think about content, rather than just the infrastructure or SaaS, ‘you become the one they ant to work with – this is a different level’, he said.

It’s early days, but it was impressive to hear Progress Software talk about the new business it’s building in new countries as a result of the new community and HP’s enthusiasm for the new revenues its bring to them.

Some conclusions – a great start, but still a way to go

Cloud 28+ – the initial European Commission research projects were much better for HP’s participation and the new community has good chances of success. However it will be difficult for HP to remove itself, especially as its Helion portfolio is a de facto (if not de jure) part of the mix. I’m doubtful whether the community will ever achieve true independence, despite Xavier’s assertion that it is ‘not my thing – it’s our thing’. It’s governance is perhaps most likely to be like an HP user group. Irrespective of its status however, HP will undoubtedly make a lot of money and win a significant number of new clients though association.

Helion – this looks very different from Cisco’s InterCloud, which at the moment appears to be mainly a way of lifting workloads from one data center to another and from SoftLayer, which is almost entirely based on IBM’s own data center resources. HP possibly has more experience than other system suppliers in the development and use of OpenStack, but is by no means unique in its fervent adoption in its cloud offerings.

HP has had a siloed, almost bureaucratic approach to its cloud business in the past, making it hard to understand what it produces and what to buy. Putting all of its eggs in the Helion basket makes sense – so at last we can see what components it has. But it still has a way to go to make Helion a world-beater, or even an ‘end to end’ solution. In particular:

• Line of business purchasers buying cloud services won’t want product details of the components the Service Providers needs to buy to get them running – HP needs to hone its messages for different types of buyer
• Not every project involves data center transformation and application modernisation; these messages become less valuable as the cloud service market enters the late majority phase
• Providing cloud outlets to ISVs should be a standard way HP does business, not a separate process with special certification
• HP is more a cloud builder than a cloud service supplier – as any of the technology it produces could be used in a cloud data center, maybe it needs to spend more time showing the ease of adoption and specific fit its Helion products have
• The Helion portfolio is not a group in its own right, but involves the participation of a number of different businesses; HP will need to continue to make advances in working together as a single company to make it work well

But despite these caveats I’ve got to admit this is a great start. It’s taken me some time to evaluate because it’s quite deep, but it looks as if both Cloud 28+ and Helion will bloom. HP is a full participant in what I’ve termed ‘the year of the revenue cloud’.