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.

Over the past couple of weeks, HP has announced several HP CloudSystem enhancements that focus on working with partners - particularly VMware and Microsoft. I also had the opportunity to spend time speaking with a number of customers on the show floor at VMworld last week.

One of the key questions I got was the difference between VMware's cloud management products and HP's CloudSystem. The same question of course applies to comparing Microsoft's cloud management products versus HP's CloudSystem.

It’s exciting to see the momentum of HP CloudSystem with over 700 customers to-date around the world, ranging from industries banking to healthcare to telecom.  Customers are building and managing private, public and hybrid environments to deliver cloud services powered by HP CloudSystem.

Written by: Richard Arthur

In previous blogs I discussed factors in market segmentation and feedback from a recent summit concerning public cloud services being launched today. Those can be found here.   In this blog I assume you have some idea of which services you want to launch, now is time to think about your platform for launch. 

Many service providers have tools and portals in place for customer services that they will want to reuse.  However do not underestimate the flexibility requirements of a cloud services platform.   As we have seen time and time again in the Internet – knowing which services you want to launch today does not mean you know which ones you will need to launch (and retire!) in six months.   Flexibility at all levels in a Cloud services platform is critical.    Further, consistency for the end-customer will be critical.   End-customers will view you as a “one-stop shop” for cloud services and they need to have them presented that way.

Finally, an “all-in-one” cloud services platform will reduce risk and investment for each service being launched. 

Define or identify the roles in your organization that will be responsible, accountable, consulted, informed (RACI) for each part of the cloud services platform.

Written by: Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Service Automation

This week at Discover 2012, HP announced a new version of HP Cloud Service Automation, available as a core element of CloudSystem Enterprise or as a standalone software product, for managing private and hybrid clouds. As a key element in HP’s Converged Cloud strategy, HP Cloud Service Automation is the industry’s most comprehensive, unified solution for brokering and managing application and infrastructure services in private and hybrid clouds, helping IT organizations increase agility and reduce cost, via a self-service portal and highly-automated lifecycle management. 

My 5 year old asked me today, “Why do I have to go to school?  Can’t I work and make money without going to school?”

How do you answer that?  Is it as simple as saying “YES!”, or does it need further explanation?

If you think of it simplistically – the end result is the same – to make money and support yourself.  However, the route to get there, and the quality of life would be different.

I think of cloud in the same way.  You can think of it one step at a time with piecemeal cloud solutions.  Or you can look at the bigger picture and have the end-game in sight so that each decision you make gets you one-step closer on your cloud journey to hybrid delivery.