GigaOM » Zorawar Biri Singh

What HP’s new cloud guy wants you to know about HP’s new cloud

Barb Darrow — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 17:36:10 +0000

HP’s cloud computing efforts have been the subject of much curiosity — not always in a good way — over the past year, but Hewlett-Packard’s top cloud guy Saar Gillai said the company is putting confusion and concern about its long-term future behind it.

“Last year was an interesting one, but in the last six months since, it’s all been positive news,” Gillai said in an interview on Wednesday at the OpenStack Summit.

Saar Gillai, Hewlett-Packard senior VP of converged cloud

During that timeframe HP brought its public cloud online and the compute, block store and object store subsystems are all broadly available. This week, it announced new “cloud bursting” capabilities for HP CloudSystem and that it had integrated its 3Par fibre-channel storage with OpenStack.

As for actual customer adoption of that HP public cloud? The company will only put the number at “thousands.” And, Gillai reaffirmed that the company will make OpenStack available on all its major platforms, which in theory would include its glitzy new Project Moonshot servers. OpenStack is HP’s operating system for cloud, is the message.

But HP’s version of OpenStack will be “hardened for the enterprise” vision and backed by enterprise-class SLAs, a stance that echoes what Zorawar Biri Singh, HP’s last cloud chief, told GigaOM a few months ago.

Here’s the thing: despite HP’s dramatic ups and downs of the past two years, it has lots of long-standing enterprise accounts that really would prefer not to defect to another vendor at this stage. “Our customers want us to succeed,” Gillai maintained. And many of these companies have barely tested cloud deployments.

The Amazon Web Services question

Many of those same customers are no doubt using Amazon Web Services for some storage or running non-mission critical workloads, but Gillai said AWS has a long way to go to become a true enterprise technology provider.

“Enterprise customers require business continuity assurances, they want someone to call and interact with,” he said. “Sure, AWS is going after the enterprise, but it’s not that simple. You need feet on the street and you need account management. There’s a reason it takes companies time to build all that. You need a brand and you need trust.”

And, he said, echoing a now familiar theme, once big companies get a true picture of how much it costs to run some loads in AWS, they may find it cheaper to bring them into their own data centers or use a private cloud deployment instead. That’s where AWS may find some tough going, despite its moves to build bridges between AWS and private clouds.

Given AWS’s momentum, and the full court press it’s made on enterprise sales, this may be wishful thinking but, as many GigaOM commenters have pointed out, the percentage of total IT spend going to cloud now is pretty damn small. These are early days.

OpenStack consolidation to come

Unlike other OpenStackers at the show, Gillai expects there to be a shakeout of OpenStack vendors over time. “If all you’re doing is [an OpenStack] distribution, that’s not a business. I can build a distro right now for a one-server system, it’s a lot harder when you’re dealing with networked systems,” he said.

This is one big reason OpenStack will not follow the Linux model, he said: “The question is, how do you make money? Linux is all about your compute system with some drivers — it’s an operating system. OpenStack is a plug-in architecture with myriad plug-ins and that can take you from one node to a million. To certify and install it can be miles more complicated than with Linux, so you need another business model.”

Companies that run public clouds — like, say HP — will be the experts with lots of insight, he said. “I would be wary of getting OpenStack distribution from someone who doesn’t run it on a huge cloud.”

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HP cloud chief’s exit sparks more confusion

Barb Darrow — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 13:25:57 +0000

Updated: Hewlett-Packard’s attempt to get its cloud computing strategy heard above the noise around the company’s bigger woes took another hit this week. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, who headed up HP’s Converged Cloud and Cloud Services effort, is gone, according to AllThingsD. He will be replaced on an interim basis by Roger Levy, group VP for technology and customer relations.

The news muddies HP’s already unclear cloud situation, although Singh’s departure is not all that surprising. He was recruited out of IBM two years ago by HP’s then-CEO Leo Apotheker. Apotheker himself was axed by HP less than a year into his tenure, replaced by current CEO Meg Whitman.

Last September, citing an internal memo, CRN reported that HP had formed a Converged Cloud business unit under the leadership of SVP Saar Gillai, who reported to Singh. Last week, AllThingsD re-reported the formation of that group, but said Gillai reported to HP COO Bill Veghte. There was no mention of Singh.

Updated at 6:52 a.m. January 17: An HP spokeswoman emailed this statement:

“HP remains committed to our Converged Cloud portfolio. In particular, HP Cloud Services is critical to HP’s efforts to deliver superior public cloud infrastructure, services and solutions to our customers. Roger Levy, vice president, Technology and Customer Operations of HP Cloud Services, will serve as the interim leader for HP Cloud Services. The company thanks Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh for his passion and commitment to drive our public cloud vision and wish him well.”

She also confirmed the AllThingsD report, saying that HP announced the formation of a “pan-HP organization dedicated to overseeing the company’s full range of HP Converged Cloud offerings” last week and promoted Saar Gillai to Senior Vice President and General Manager of HP Converged Cloud.

HP~~, which could not be reached for comment,~~ has been hindered by bigger issues around its costly Autonomy acquisition and plateauing PC-and-server business, and has struggled to make its vision of enterprise-class cloud heard above the competition. In an interview last year, Singh told me the company could differentiate itself from other public and private cloud providers by offering the types of high-level and specific service level agreements (SLAs) that Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers do not.

It’s easy to write HP off after all its management chaos and poorly handled acquisitions. In its proxy statement last month, the company reopened the possibility of selling off business units. Since then, speculation has amped up that it might even sell off Autonomy – which it bought in 2011 for more than $11 billion — and Enterprise Services unit, which grew out of its 2008 $13.9 billion buyout of EDS. But, the company still has many, many large, enterprise accounts, many of which have barely tested the cloud computing scenario. If it gets its act together any time soon, those companies may stay with the program. If not … well that’s the multi-billion-dollar question.

This story was updated at 6:52 a.m. with comments from HP.

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With HP now in the game, the enterprise cloud fray gets more interesting

Barb Darrow — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 05:00:27 +0000

As expected, Hewlett-Packard will announce general availability of its OpenStack compute cloud this week. And with that, the whole enterprise cloud picture gets more interesting.

It’s easy to discount HP given its long-running troubles, but the IT giant still has lots of customers — the types of customers that make major IT decisions at the CIO level. Amazon Web Services, on the other hand, has been a lower-level developer sale, although that’s starting to change. C-level execs at big companies may not be comfortable using AWS, which after all, is a sideline business offered by an online reseller. (Sorry, AWS, but you won’t even tell us what your revenue is.)

Enterprises buy a different cloud story

“Enterprises are looking for more traditional, full-service relationship and aren’t sure about Google and Amazon,” said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. “HP could capitalize on that.”

The enterprise IT vendors — Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle, et al are playing catchup to Amazon in public cloud deployments. They want to move their existing hardware, software and services customers to their own clouds. And AWS is working hard to siphon those customers away with higher level enterprise-class services. That’s what I mean about more interesting.

HP claims SLA advantage in cloud

HP COO Bill Veghte (pictured) will unveil HP Cloud Compute at the HP Discover event on Wednesday. Prices start at $0.04 per hour with a service level agreement (SLA) of at least 99.95 percent — or fewer than 30 minutes downtime per month. AWS offers an SLA of 99.95 percent per year but requires very specific configurations to meet its bar for reimbursement. Gartner analyst Lydia Leong has said that Amazon’s SLAs are “narrowly defined” and don’t cover Elastic Block Storage (EBS), which most customers use.

That’s a difference HP hopes will attract customers. “HP customers want an HP cloud,” HP cloud chief Zorawar Biri Singh told me recently.

IBM says the same thing. As does Rackspace — which touts “fanatical support” as its drawing card. On the other side of the aisle, AWS is recruiting enterprise sales and support engineers from big IT companies to build sales coverage and customer rapport. Last week at AWS: Reinvent it named 15 premier consulting partners — 2^nd Watch, 8K Miles, Aquilent, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, CSS, CITYTECH, Cognizant, Datapipe, Dedalus, MarketShare, Razorfish, Smartronix, Full 360, and Wipro – to help with enterprise accounts. No one is standing still in this important battle for cloud credibility and customers.

Here’s the thing: AWS is by far the leader in cloud now, but it’s also true that we are very early in the game when it comes to enterprise cloud deployments. Anything can happen.

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What HP’s cloud chief wants you to know about HP’s cloud

Barb Darrow — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:29:23 +0000

The controversies that afflicted Hewlett-Packard in the past few years have given even the most loyal customers and partners pause. This is, after all, a company that has gone through a half dozen CEOs in 6 years. That uncertainty doesn’t help HP’s cloud computing strategy, which had so many moving parts that the company launched yet another reorg to rationalize the effort two months ago. That might help, but HP still needs to prove it can execute on cloud computing and not surprisingly, Zorawar Biri Singh, SVP and GM of HP Cloud Services, says it can.

Here’s a boiled down version of the Q&A I had with Singh Friday afternoon.

Where’s the rest of the HP OpenStack cloud?

The HP public cloud beta that went live in May includes OpenStack-based storage and content delivery network (CDN) components. The compute piece of that cloud will come soon — probably next month at the HP Discover conference in Frankfurt. Singh did not promise code delivery at that time, but said to “stay tuned.” And a betting person would say that the company had better have real code ready for that event.

HP’s aim is to provide a sort of “OpenStack Plus.” Singh said the company will “curate a set of OpenStack code, adding value around billing, metering, identity, orchestration, load balancing, DNS and messaging services — stuff that will extend OpenStack.”

As for private cloud, he said HP is working on it. “Expect us to have a common reference architecture and code base for public and private cloud soon,” he said.

Will enterprises want and wait for HP’s cloud vs. Amazon?

It’s true that it’s still early days for enterprise cloud and HP contends that big companies want more reliability and service than is available now in any public cloud. They also want “raw service level agreements (SLAs) in which we’ll guarantee you this much performance or will pay you for it,” Singh said. “We think our SLAs will emerge as a differentiator for any cloud vendor.”

HP says its SLAs for object storage and CDN offer 99.95 percent availability compared to 99.90 percent for Amazon storage and CDN. HP recognizes one failed instance as “unavailable” while AWS says all running instances have to be without external connectivity to be categorized as such.

HP will go after enterprise workloads — traditional mission-critical jobs — as well as newer “mobile stuff.” And enterprise customers have been unwilling to commit mission critical loads to cloud yet, in his view. There are “many customers that won’t commit to the VMware or the IBM stack yet,” he said. Many of HP’s current enterprise customers want an HP cloud, he said.

But why HP Openstack vs. Rackspace or Red Hat OpenStack?

Again, it’s the “OpenStack Plus” argument. HP thinks its enterprise software know-how — all the enterprise IP it’s accumulated with the acquisition of Mercury Interactive and other software companies in the past decade — will make its OpenStack shine above the others. And, Singh said it’s done a ton with OpenStack since it started working on it last year.

The SLA argument holds true here too, he said. According to HP, Rackspace offers 99.90 percent SLA for storage and CDN compared to 99.95 percent for HP.

Finally, HP being a hardware company still, hopes to press that advantage as well by “fusing” OpenStack into its converged hardware.

How will HP sell its cloud?

Part of HP’s problem has been fragmentation of the company itself. People working in servers and storage, enterprise software, PC, or printer group might just have well as been with separate companies. Given that, the hope is that the company can get people together to sell the HP cloud story. The formation of the converged cloud group targeted that problem. And on the sales side, a “cloud strike team” of several hundred people is “incented and paid on cloud alone” Singh said.

Netting it out

So here’s the thing. Singh talked a good game but execution is key. In early October, HP COO Bill Veghte said HP’s cloud related revenue grew 39 percent year over year to $4 billion in 2012, and forecast it will hit $8.4 billion by 2015, that’s an impressive number. But HP most definitely does not have the enterprise cloud space to itself. There it will contend with arch-rival IBM yet again. Meanwhile, Rackspace and Red Hat are promoting their respective OpenStack clouds to a similar set of customers. IBM itself has yet to detail its OpenStack plan, but it, like HP, has said it will bake OpenStack into its hardware. HP’s SLA story is strong, but no one expects the other players attacking this market — including Amazon which is adding more enterprise capabilities to its cloud all the time — will stand still. Look for Amazon to talk up its enterprise pitch at Amazon Re:Invent next week.

It’s true that we’re in the early days of enterprise cloud, but there is no shortage of proven IT powers in addition to HP that are in this game to stay.

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Europe: Lots of cloud opportunity to tap

Barb Darrow — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 16:00:49 +0000

There’s a ton of cloud opportunity in Europe — the question is how fast it will come to fruition and what’s driving it. Those are the questions we’ll be asking — and getting answers to — at Structure:Europe in October.

Cloud adoption on the continent has thus far come slower than in the U.S. But hardly anyone expects the status quo to hold. For one thing, the use of private cloud deployments by European organizations is on the rise. Twenty percent of companies responding to a recent IDC survey said they implemented private clouds this year up from 6 percent in 2011. And, in March, results of a Tata Consultancy Services survey showed that, in aggregate, 12 percent of European companies’ total applications run in the cloud now, but they expect that percentage to hit 25 percent by 2014.

One big question is what’s driving the cloud migrations. The conventional wisdom is that companies make the move to save money, but the rationale may be more complex than that. That issue will be addressed by experts at the upcoming GigaOM Structure:Europe conference. Speaking at the show, James Mitchell, CEO and founder of Strategic Blue and Sander Nagtegaal, co-founder and CTO of Peecho, will discuss what they see as the driving factors behind cloud adoption. Some companies say that cloud’s ability to let them roll out new business processes across locations fast and easily, is even more important than any potential cost savings.

Another hot topic is which of the players building out global public cloud infrastructure can challenge Amazon’s dominance. One contender in the European spotlight is Hewlett-Packard. Zorawar “Biri” Singh, SVP and GM of HP’s Cloud Services effort will be in Amsterdam to talk about his company’s gargantuan effort. And, representing the incumbent market leader, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services will also be on hand.

Check out the full Structure:Europe schedule here.

Cloud photo courtesy of Flickr user carolune

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