HP's top Aussie partners to create cloud coalition

HP is trying to establish a network of top partners to provide a federated cloud in Australia as part of its global HP Helion Network strategy, CRN understands.

The Helion Network is "a global network of service providers and partners offering a broad portfolio of open standards-based cloud services to enterprise customers". HP Helion is based on OpenStack distribution.

CRN understands that HP is currently floating the idea of a local network among some of its top Australian partners, with more details expected to be announced by the end of April.

Although neither HP nor its partners would comment when contacted by CRN, it is expected candidates include major HP specialists such as Triforce, Somerville Group and Klikon, the Sydney IT company that recently won a major global HP award for its Helion work.

Other top HP cloud partners include Data#3, NTT Communications, Datacom and Oriel, which is now owned by BigAir.

It is expected this consortium of HP partners would provide the local infrastructure backbone for the new Helion Marketplace, a global platform through which resellers can "sell, provision, maintain and invoice cloud services from Helion Network service provider partners".

For instance, marketplace users will be able to spin up solutions from platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service partners, such as data protection from Riverbed or cloud storage from Panzura.

Many of HP's partners already boast significant private clouds based on compute, storage and networking from HP, as well as other vendors. HP itself has also poured millions of dollars into its own 134,000sqm Aurora data centre in western Sydney. It is understood the Helion Network would be hosted across all these environments.

Basing the Helion Network around partner infrastructure would help HP prove it wants to use its channel to take cloud services to market, rather than build its own public cloud and potentially go head to head with resellers.

HP is also playing nice with other cloud providers, including market leader Amazon Web Services. Last September, HP acquired Eucalyptus, which provides a bridge into AWS and other third-party public clouds. This means that clients could, for instance, spin up low-cost virtual machines in the highly elastic Amazon cloud for test and dev, then easily migrate workloads back to private infrastructure for production.

Developers, developers

HP is also courting Australian developers with the launch of its Helion Code Wars competition in Australia, supported by managed services provider The Frame Group.

Over four weeks in May, teams of two will leverage their skills with the "LAMP stack" (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to battle for a first prize of $10,000.

They'll be given access to the HP Helion Development Platform and HP Helion OpenStack.

The competition will focus on "open weather data analysis combined with possible integration with other open data set, for example linking traffic data and weather data, or health data and weather data".

Helion Code Wars builds on a pre-existing competition that has been run by multi-state MSP Frame Group for several years

IT consultant Dez Blanchfield has been working with The Frame Group for the past six months, and is playing a key role in Code Wars, which he said was "less pizza and beers and more ideas and innovation" than the typical hackathon.

"The idea is to take a hackathon concept but an enterprise-grade version - an enterprise-grade hackathon."

The initiative shows HP's desire to expand its partner footprint beyond the traditional channel and work with developers and ISVs.

It's a strategy being pushed by many other vendors as they seek to woo application builders to create on their cloud. IBM has been vocal about wooing developers to write applications for its Linux on Power platform, while ISVs have a prized place in the Microsoft community.