The Clouds Part on HP's Computing Strategy
source: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2008/05/portfolio_0513
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- kushan
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Five years ago, if Hewlett-Packard bought EDS, everyone would've thought it was pretty much like when IBM bought PwC -- a play to create a powerful data processing consulting business that could coexist with a computer hardware business. In fact, that's been a great model for IBM.
But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.
If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.
If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.
But with HP today buying EDS for $12 billion, the smart thinking goes in a different direction. It's looking like a red-hot area going forward for IBM, Amazon and Google will be so-called cloud computing -- a.k.a. hardware as a service.
If you're a startup or a corporate IT manager, you increasingly won't have to buy computers to run your business. You just rent capabilities from some computing giant and move the information there and back over the internet. If something crashes, the data is always backed up and stored somewhere out there in the cloud. This is the ubiquitous computing idea IBM has pushed for a decade -- making computer power something like electric power.
If you tack together some of HP's other purchases under CEO Mark Hurd -- as Om Malik did -- it seems even more obvious that HP is at least as interested in cloud computing as consulting. And EDS is a solid cloud-computing play because a core business is owning and running giant data centers.
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- tags:
- EDS, HP Computing
