HP Cloud Services: Can Singh Rally Partners?

What’s next for the HP Public Cloud? Senior VP Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh will deliver the answers during HP Discover 2012 (Dec. 4-6, Franfurt, Germany). Sure, CEO Meg Whitman will assure customers and partners that HP is on the mend following a brutal write-down tied to the 2011 Autonomy acquisition. But for established and emerging cloud partners, Singh’s words will matter most.

As senior VP and general manager, HP Cloud Services, Singh has been working to effectively position his company against entrenched rivals (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, etc.) and old foes that are moving into cloud computing (Dell, IBM, Oracle). He explained the strategy — including channel partner considerations — to Talkin’ Cloud during the OpenStack conference in April 2012.

But how much progress have Singh and HP made since that April interview? During HP Discovery, Singh is expected to explain how customers are moving workloads seamlessly between private, managed and public clouds.

During HP’s Q4 2012 earnings call, CEO Meg Whitman said the HP CloudSystem has caught on with 850 customers and she also pointed to HP Service Anywhere (help desk in the cloud) momentum. But Whitman really didn’t say much about the HP Public cloud, which offers storage, hosting and dev-test services.

HP’s controversial 2011 buyout of Autonomy has dominated most headlines in the past week. HP claims Autonomy’s former leadership made misleading statements and inflated certain financial figures to drive up HP’s buyout price for Autonomy.

Amid that backdrop, Singh must take the HP Discover 2012 stage and shift the conversation toward HP’s cloud milestones and next moves. It won’t be an easy moment, but Singh is a clear, concise communicator. He can communicate a vision while also offering practical guidance to VARs, MSPs and cloud integrators.

Will Singh be on message? Talkin’ Cloud will be listening in for clues.