HP bets big on Indian telcos with Helion cloud services

NEW DELHI: Betting big on the telecom sector in India, Hewlett-Packard ( HP) India today introduced Helion portfolio of cloud products and services that promises to help organisations build and manage workloads in hybrid IT environments.

The firm will also invest over $1 billon in its Helion brand globally to support and deliver new open source cloud products and platforms in the next two years.

The firm's Helion solutions incorporates existing HP cloud offerings, new OpenStack technology-based products and professional and support services under a unified portfolio to help meet customers' specific business requirements.

OpenStack is a free and open-source software cloud computing platform, which is primarily deployed as an IaaS solution (infrastructure as a service). HP is a major contributor to OpenStack.

HP is extending its commitment to OpenStack technology and hybrid IT delivery--spanning traditional IT, public, private and managed clouds, HP (Asia Pacific & Japan) VP and General Manager Cloud Division Aman Dokania said.

"HP plans to invest more than USD 1 billion over the next two years on cloud-related product and engineering initiatives, professional services and expanding HP Helion's global reach," he added.

As a founding platinum member of OpenStack Foundation, HP has taken a central role in developing technologies that are built to meet enterprise requirements and to deliver such technologies and cloud foundry-based solutions to the global marketplace, Dokania said.

On the telecom sector in India, HP (Asia Pacific & Japan) Director Sales Cloud Division Ramachandran V said, Indian telcos will be among the first adopters of cloud.

"We would like to work with two-or three of the leading players in the market," he added.

Explaining the cloud services market for telcos in India, Ramchandran said that firms are fast realising that this is an option through which companies can not only optimise costs, but also provide more services to customers and also scale the operations.

HP's Helion OpenStack-based cloud services will be made available globally via the firm's partner network of more than 110 service providers worldwide and in HP data centres. HP operates over 80 data centres in 27 countries.

It plans to provide OpenStack-based public cloud services in 20 data centres worldwide over the next 18 months.

The new cloud products and services join HP's existing portfolio of hybrid cloud computing offerings, including the next-generation HP CloudSystem.