Everything in the cloud moves more quickly than traditional IT. With cloud-based provisioning, IT administrators need to operate in real-time, with much higher visibility into the availability of resources and how they are being used. Here is a brief look at three key ways that the new release of HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 addresses the complexity of this dynamic with intelligent resource utilization, greater heterogeneous support and improved financial and asset management.

By Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud/Automation Solutions

Ready to be a part of the Software as a Service revolution but not sure where to start? Attend HP Discover!  There are loads of opportunities to learn about HP SaaS and solutions for performance monitoring, Agile development, Product and Portfolio Management, Service Management, Application Lifecycle Management, and more - all delivered by HP SaaS. Below is a list of sessions you might be interested in to learn best practices, hear case studies, and get the latest from the leaders in enterprise Software as a Service - HP SaaS!

As the pressures on IT grow, with available resources typically either staying constant, or shrinking, IT organizations have little choice but to become ever more efficient. Increasingly, that means automating whenever and wherever possible. Here is a high-level look at HP’s three-step best practice approach for automation in the next-gen data center and across IT.

by Muneer Mubashir, HP Cloud and Automation product marketing

A new style of IT is emerging.  Cloud computing is fundamentally changing the way people live and work. And just like client/server did, the changes will significantly impact Information technology – people, processes and technology.

Enterprises have been steadily embracing private and managed cloud environments and are increasingly finding use cases for the public cloud. We are past the point of the cloud being limited to shadow IT and startups.

Ready, fire, aim!

As companies quickly move toward cloud adoption, many are placing application performance management at the tail end of their planning.

Without proper visibility into all aspects of their environments, these organizations may unintentionally aim at the wrong target – if they’ve identified targets at all.  Unfortunately, if a cloud system isn’t designed with visibility as a focus these misses can be inevitable.

Keep reading to find out how integrating HP Performance Anywhere early in your planning can provide you with the on-target results your business requires. 

A new era for Cloud Management is dawning. Discover HP’s solutions for how you can enable business efficiencies, agility and scale by automating end-to-end application delivery as well as building, orchestrating and brokering hybrid cloud services.

by Manoj Raisinghani, Senior Director, HP Software Product Marketing

Engaging older adults with chronic conditions through the use of cloud services has the potential to:

• Reduce healthcare costs
• Improve patient health and independence

So what is holding adoption back?

Are you attending SAP Sapphire 2013? If you are, we have a few suggestions for cloud solution demos you will not want to miss.

These demos have been specifically designed for SAP landscapes, and will demonstrate what is possible when the power of HP and SAP come together. Keep reading to find out how you can benefit from this partnership.

Join us !

Hear more about the latest extensions made to our current portfolio. Be one of the first to learn how to leverage the cloud, to dramatically improve the speed of delivery to business requests. Increase speed of innovation to your end user, and enable the development of systems that your business wants to use. Meet your obligations today to streamline your cost structure.

With written contribution from Andrew Wahl and Sathya Sastry

HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA) has made designing cloud services from scratch a simple and straightforward process; but what happens if your enterprise is running on multiple systems? How can you export and import service designs, so that you can reuse and customize existing designs between different instances? How do we ensure that service designs provided do not remain stagnant over time?

Read on to find out how HP CSA has helped raise the bar in the way service designs are created and used. We will also uncover how service designs with HP CSA continue to grow in value over time.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of blog posts that will look at how cloud administrators can use HP Cloud Service Automation. Follow the series on Grounded In the Cloud.

With written contribution from Andrew Wahl and Sathya Sastry

Why create something from scratch when you can work from a plan that already works? HP Cloud Service Automation features many templates—and more are released monthly—for mounting new types of resource providers of cloud environments. Keep reading to learn how to use them to simplify setup and provisioning of your cloud service.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of blog posts that will look at how cloud administrators can use HP Cloud Service Automation. Follow the series on Grounded In the Cloud.

Written by:  Steve White  - IDC IT Channels and Alliances: Trends and Predictions 2013, doc #WC20130206, February 2013.

The Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is well worth taking the time out to read up on. Go and look it up on Wikipedia or the like and see how a principle from over 100 years ago is applied in many forms in business today.   In this prediction, the rule application is supported by some recent IDC surveys which suggest that partners that have already transitioned to the cloud, or are investing in a major cloud focus, have 2.5 times the revenue growth and close deals that are more than twice as big as those who have not.

HP:  As a HP Channel Partner are you interested in rounding out your Cloud services offering?  Reselling leading Cloud Service Provider offerings?   Post your reply.  We can help.

Chris

For more information on HP Converged Cloud visit www.hp.com/go/cloud

For more information on HP CloudSystem visit www.hp.com/go/cloudsystem

Follow me on Twitter @HPCloudSystem

Join the Cloud Advisors discussions on LinkedIn

Written by: Kelley Lynch, WW HP CloudAgile Marketing Manager

Today, private cloud remains a top growth area.  As a provider of cloud services, you want to meet your customer’s needs.  Within hosted private cloud environments, HP’s end users consistently tell us they want the following...

With written contribution from Andrew Wahl and Sathya Sastry

Inside most large enterprises, IT organizations are responsible for administering multiple types of cloud environments. In some cases the cloud environments are from the same provider, but often they come from multiple sources—keeping track of them all can feel like a pair of shackles.

Luckily, HP Cloud Service Automation organizes all of these resource providers into one system. Now you can  manage and bind them to specific service designs, which can then be presented as part of a service catalog for business users.

Keep reading to find out how you can free your IT staff from the drudgery of maintain Cloud services.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of blog posts that will look at how cloud administrators can use HP Cloud Service Automation. Follow the series on Grounded In the Cloud.

The fact is that data centers are getting bigger and more complex. Unfortunately the headaches caused by this complexity are too big for aspirin to handle.  You are looking for a way to meet the increasing demands of your shareholders while relieving some of the pressure points caused by complexity.

Luckily we have a solution for you. Keep reading to find out about the top five success strategies we are presenting at a webinar on April 25. You won’t want to miss it.

Accelerate your deployment as a cloud service broker with CloudSystem Enterprise Starter Service. It will  be made available starting  April 1, 2013. 

It was designed to set up a solid foundation for customers of HP CloudSystem Matrix. Continue reading to learn how CloudSystem Enterprise Starter Service ensures that your process of delivering cloud services is done right. This is accomplished by starting from the very first step. 

With written contribution from Andrew Wahl and Sathya Sastry

Provisioning cloud services to business users needs to be an efficient, yet still customizable process. The faster that administrators are able to respond to requests—or better yet, proactively satisfy their businesses specific needs for cloud computing resources—the more likely that lines of business will not attempt to work outside of approved Corporate IT policies and engage in “Shadow IT”.

Continue reading to learn how administrators use HP Cloud Service Automation to design cloud services with integrated workflows, and provision cloud services for a wide range of private, managed and public cloud resources.

Editor’s note: This is part of a series of blog posts that will look at how cloud administrators can use HP Cloud Service Automation. Follow the series on Grounded In the Cloud.

You were just called into a staff meeting in the morning, where you were told by your CIO that your capital budget has been decidedly halved. Seated in your windowless office cubicle of your data centre, you look at the rows of networking equipment overflowing from their rack space and wonder how you will manage this IT sprawl.

You now have half the budget and yet your data increases daily. Keep reading to see if there is a light at the end of this tunnel.

I know, joining a virtual meeting that is being hosted in San Juan, Puerto Rico is probably not your first choice, as I am sure you would prefer to be there is person. But if you are interested in taking a technology tour of HP’s Converged Cloud, this will be of interest to you. If you have been following me, you will know that every 6 months or so HP invites a group of industry bloggers to come into HP to gain a very deep product view of our technology. For instance, we have run tech days spotlighting HP 3Par storage and late last year we ran an event that focused around the new Gen 8 Proliant servers amongst others.

With written contribution from Andrew Wahl and Sathya Sastry

Imagine what you could do with the power of HP Cloud Service Automation (CSA).  You could evolve your existing infrastructure and virtualized environments into scalable cloud services. You could respond to changing business demands quickly and economically while realizing faster time-to-value. 

Now your dreams can be a reality with CSA. To take your first steps as an Enterprise-Grade Cloud Service Broker to IT and Line of Business Users, continue reading to uncover how to harness the power of CSA. In the coming weeks, we will provide a practitioner’s view of the key factors you need to consider, as you plan your journey to be a cloud service broker.

For now, learn how you can use HP CSA to improve the administration of your cloud services.

I don’t want to be accused of moving readership way from this cloud blog, but did wanted to promote a new site I came across today focused around virtualization - Software Defined Data Centers. It makes an interesting read.

Very simply, HP Cloud Maps allow TIBCO and HP CloudSystem Matrix customers to provision enterprise apps on HP CloudSystem Matrix quicker and more reliably. 

TIBCO and HP have worked closely together to bundle their deep knowledge in hardware, operating system and Silver Fabric to develop the TIBCO Silver Fabric Cloud Map. HP Cloud Maps are prepackaged, optimized and tested cloud service designs for use with HP CloudSystem Matrix to automate the deployment of applications in the cloud.

To learn more about how TIBCO’s engagement with HP to develop Cloud Map for Silver Fabric is adding a huge value to its customers view the Global Partner Conference, 2013 Cloud Maps video.

The ever-increasing pace of technological innovation is disrupting the IT industry today. But, it also brings many opportunities for advances in the IT department. Every day, we see new and innovative solutions emerge in the marketplace. And while these solutions enable customers to be more productive and efficient, there may also be hidden costs associated –unintended results and undesired consequences.

For example, when onboarding new applications and solutions, customers realize that they need to re-tool their environment.  Some times this means retiring an existing tool that the business is familiar with, and is still serving them well. These are added costs and a resistance to change that IT can do without.

Continue reading to learn how HP Continuous Delivery Automation protects your organization from such fail points when onboarding new applications. 

I have not been to this event before and was looking forward to attending - Mobile is even more pervasive than ever before and soon nearly everything around us, people and things, will be connected. Mobile has forever changed the way we communicate, the way we conduct business, the way we manage our lives, and the way we are entertained. The possibilities for future innovations are nearly endless. Easy to say the words, but after attending this show it become very clear how far mobility has come in such a short period of time. Who would have thought that 5 years ago 70,000 plus people would be attending the event in Barcelona!!

You have created your cloud infrastructure; and now everything is in place—well almost.  You have your service catalog online, but it is empty because you do not have any services to provision with. Traditionally you would have created these services yourself and they would have taken months of test to get them production ready. With HP Cloud Maps now you can fast track building your application service catalogue in minutes!

Come discover how HP Cloud Maps can accelerate your ability to design and deploy cloud services. Come and see Cloud Maps Demo @ HP Booth: Industry Analyst Summit 2013 currently running in Boston, Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel.

Written by Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager of Converged Cloud for Hewlett Packard

The growth and market acceptance of OpenStack has been a journey.  One that HP has been closely involved with for nearly two years.  Our decision to leverage OpenStack for our cloud platform was not made lightly, and was based on our experience of deploying cloud solutions for several years prior to our OpenStack participation. In fact, we have thousands of customers using our cloud solutions and services, and those numbers are growing quickly. 

Unlock your potential as a broker of cloud services, for both IT and line of business users. Now you can open doors with the new HP CloudSystem Enterprise Starter Suite, available today 01st March 2013. Leverage the benefits of CloudSystem Matrix, integrated with HP Cloud Service Automation. 

Learn how as a broker of Cloud Services, you can deploy a full range of services models (PaaS/SaaS and IaaS) delivered to IT as well as the line of business teams. Keep reading to find out the best service model for you.

The number of services and options moving to the Cloud is increasing exponentially. This is also increasing the confusion and complexity faced by IT departments. This doesn’t only  apply to  traditional, premise-based infrastructure services, but also the manner in which line of business users consume services from external cloud providers.

In this article, we explore the construct of a Cloud Services Broker in relation to IT, and key attributes that make for a successful Cloud Services Broker platform. We learn how CloudSystem Matrix enhanced with the integration of HP Cloud Services Automation (CSA) unlocks IT’s potential as a broker of cloud services on to itself and her line of business users.

Monitoring your apps for a mobile world means more than simply making sure the app is running, and it has broader impact than you might have considered.

As cloud computing evolves, the integration of cloud services can be too complex for IT to manage across a private and/or hybrid cloud environment.  So what should you do to keep pace and reduce complexity? 

The first step is to learn about the different cloud service models that IT is expected to support, and the scope of work behind each of these cloud service models. Continue reading to find out more about the full range of cloud services you can expect from HP Cloud Service Automation.