HP at the Discover 2011 Conference in Vienna last week announced a wide range of new Cloud Solutions designed to advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds for enterprises, service providers, and governments. Based on HP Converged Infrastructure, the new and updated HP Cloud Solutions provide the hardware, software, services and programs rapidly and securely deliver IT as a service.

I found these announcements a clearer indicator of HP's latest cloud strategy, with an emphasis on enabling a global, verticalized and marketplace-driven tier of cloud providers. I've been asked plenty about HP's public cloud roadmap, which has been murky. This now tells me that HP is going first to its key service provider customers for data center and infrastructure enablement for their clouds.

This makes a lot of sense. The next generation of clouds -- and I'd venture the larger opportunity once the market settles -- will be specialized clouds. Not that Amazon Web Services, Google, and Rackspace are going away. But one-size fits all approaches will inevitably give way to specialization and localization. Telecos are in a great position to step up and offer these value-add clouds and services to their business customers. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

And HP is better off providing the picks and shovels to them in spades, than to come to market in catch-up mode with plain vanilla public cloud services under its own brand. It the classic clone strategy that worked for PCs, right? Partnerships and ecosystem alliances are the better way. A good example is the partnership announced last week with Savvis.

HP’s new offerings address the key areas of client needs – building differentiated cloud offerings, consuming cloud services from the public domain, and managing, governing and securing the entire environment. This again makes sense. No need for channel conflict on cloud services between this class of nascent cloud providers and the infrastructure providers themselves.

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