H.P. Attempts to Take On Amazon’s Cloud Service

Within two months, Hewlett-Packard will offer a large and powerful cloud computing service similar to Amazon Web Services, but with more business-oriented features, according the head of the project.

“We’re not just building a cloud for infrastructure,” said Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of H.P.’s cloud services. “Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services.” Among the first software applications available as part of the Hewlett-Packard cloud, he said, will be both structured and unstructured databases, and data analytics as a service.

“We won’t pull (Amazon’s) customers out by the horns,” he said, “but we already have customers in beta who see us as a great alternative.” He did not say how much the computing services would cost, but said “we are not coming at this at ‘8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents.’” Amazon recently cut its prices, and its lowest cost computing is 2 cents per hour, though with extra features it can cost more. While Amazon tends largely to have a self-service model, Hewlett-Packard’s cloud will also offer more personalized sales and service, Mr. Singh said.

H.P. also plans to offer a number of tools for developers to use popular online software languages, like Ruby, Java, and PHP, as well as ways for customers to provision and manage their workloads remotely. The service will also include an online store where people can offer or rent software for use in the Hewlett-Packard public cloud. Mr. Singh said the company would take precautions to ensure the quality and security of these software offerings from third parties by providing services like user authentication and billing.

Hewlett-Packard’s alternative to A.W.S. has been underway for over a year, and is likely to be the most ambitious project yet under Meg Whitman, who became chief executive of the Palo Alto, Calif., technology company last September. While seemingly focused on Amazon, the company is also looking at the project as a new way to compete with its traditional rivals.

“We want to make it hard for an I.B.M. or an Oracle or anyone to come in,” he said. By offering a lot of tools for developers and business-ready software to corporations, H.P. could find ways to undercut existing enterprise offerings, while surviving against Amazon, a notoriously low-margin competitor.

Though the data centers presently supporting H.P.’s cloud are located only on the East and West Coasts of the United States, H.P. plans to scale the program by installing small data centers across the globe. This small and dispersed approach is a break from the goliath data centers run by cloud companies like Amazon and Google. The project will run almost entirely on Hewlett-Packard technology.

As ambitious as the program sounds, Mr. Singh said the revenue from the public cloud business will have little initial impact on H.P.’s annual revenue, which are in excess of $100 billion. His project will be judged, he said, as much on how well it helps other parts of Hewlett-Packard’s business as it is on its own revenue. “We do everything from laptops to cloud computing,” he said. “This will leverage our whole sales channel.”

The analytics Hewlett-Packard will offer will be derived from its earlier purchases of Vertica and Autonomy. H.P. has previously talked about offering these pattern-finding capabilities in its computer servers. In addition, it hopes to use the public cloud, which like other clouds will interoperate with the computing resources inside companies, as a way to showcase its latest servers, which Mr. Singh said outperformed cheaper commercial offerings in areas like power usage and computing capabilities when H.P. was designing the system.