Hewlett-Packard accidentally revealed more details of its cloud computing plans today when an exec updated his LinkedIn profile.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker (pictured above) announced that HP was making a big push into cloud computing last month, but didn’t go into much detail, except to say it was building “platform-as-a-service” (like Microsoft’s Windows Azure) and “infrastructure-as-a-service” (like Amazon Web Services) clouds.
Today VP of cloud services Scott McClellan updated his LinkedIn profile with a bunch of details on exactly what HP is building. The Register published it before McClellan had a chance to pull it back.
Here’s what HP is building:
• “Object storage” service “built from scratch.” This sounds like simple data storage, which has been part of Amazon Web Services since its inception and was an early part of Windows Azure as well.
• HP “compute”, “networking” and “block storage” services. This sounds superficially similar to the services offered by AWS, but McClellan boasted that it will be different from what’s out there now. He called it “a declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management.”
• Shared services for nuts-and-bolts functions like user authentication and authorisation, billing and metering, and analytics.
• A developer experience that will include Java and Ruby, as well as “other open-source languages”.
Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing service, .NET development platform, and C# programming language were not mentioned.
This is interesting because last year HP was one of three companies – along with Dell and Fujitsu – who agreed to build “Azure appliances”, which would let large enterprise customers run local instances of Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.
At last month’s strategy announcement, however, CEO Apotheker declined to say whether HP was still on board with this plan, which was hatched under the leadership of his predecessor Mark Hurd.