Hewlett-Packard is continuing to challenge Amazon in the public cloud domain. It has launched its own public cloud service which takes advantage of its own datacenters. HP’s Converged Cloud is similar to Amazon’s Web Services (we reported earlier). Beginning May 10, Converged Cloud will be offering on-demand virtual machines and instances where customers can pay for its use. It is, however, unclear if HP will be able to dominate the market where Amazon reigns supreme.

HP is currently providing private clouds and running datacenters for its partners. However, in September 2011, it began seriously planning to capture a share of the public cloud market. HP will be launching 2 IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which also includes a storage service. A relational database tool will also be offered for MySQL users. The company is hoping to revive its position through the public cloud offering. It hopes revenues from its cloud computing efforts will be able to reduce the financial impact of falling printing and PC revenues.

HP will not abandon its private cloud service because there will always be a demand for a mix of private and public deployments. When Converged Cloud is released in May, HP will also launch services to manage hybrid clouds and management of private clouds.

Due to the growth of cloud computing, new competitors are entering the industry. More and more companies are joining the public clouds. According to a Morgan Stanley survey in 2011, about half of the businesses will be shifting to the clouds by 2015.