HP SA investigating consumer cloud offering
Hewlett-Packard (HP) South Africa is investigating the need for a consumer cloud offering in the country.
As recently as April, the multinational hardware and software corporation launched its first public cloud service, and was criticized for being very late to the cloud game.
Rudie Raath, technology consulting country manager at HP SA, told BusinessTech: “If people think we are late to market from a cloud perspective, we are definitely not late. We made sure that we were ready. You only have one chance to be successful, you have to bring the right solutions, or you will lose credibility very quickly.”
HP’s CloudBook defines consumer cloud as incorporating services that would have required on-premise storage, computing, and device hardware. “All of these can now be delivered from remote elastic storage and devices such as smartphones, notebooks and PCs. It represents an integrated service offering that delivers a significantly enriched user experience.”
“An investigation is underway on whether to entertain a consumer-based cloud within a South African context. There is definitely a need,” said Raath, adding that “we may not go for a consumer-based offering, but we may look at more of a hosting-type environment.”
HP employs approximately 1,000 people in South Africa and also has offices in 13 countries around Africa.
Raath said that, with the current revenue split at 70% for hardware, and 30% for software products, HP is well-placed for growth. “We are definitely moving into the upper layer where we are starting to harness more of our software intelligence. We are an infrastructure company [at] our core, but we have very good software and excellent services.”
He pointed to three target areas moving forward: “We are going to focus on cloud, we are going to focus on information management, and we are going to focus on security,” Raath said.
Raath finished, saying that ,with more bandwidth becoming available, “what we have today, allows us to mobilise a private cloud.”
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