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HPE goes live with Europe-wide cloud service catalogue
HPE’s Cloud 28+ service catalogue is open for business and hopes to encourage wider take-up of off-premises services across the continent
Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Cloud 28+ catalogue is open for business, with 150 members showcasing 680 off-premise services through the online marketplace.
The Cloud 28+ portal allows enterprises located in the 28 EU member states to search for and compare services that fall under the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) categories from providers located across the continent.
To enable this, each provider will need to publish details of their pricing plans, certifications and service level agreements, as well as information about the location of their datacentres for data sovereignty purposes.
At present, the catalogue features a mix of data management, online productivity services, software development tools and security offerings, with HPE advising that more will be added in the coming months.
Catalogue users will not be able to purchase services through the portal for the time being, but – when they find a supplier who fits the bill – will be directed to their website and sales team to complete their transaction.
Cloud 28+: The story so far
The company formally unveiled Cloud 28+ in March 2015 after a year of preparation, as part of a wider push in HPE to drive adoption of cloud technologies in the commercial and public sector across Europe by offering organisations access to a one-stop-shop for off-premise services.
The initiative has drawn comparisons with the UK government’s G-Cloud procurement hub, which is used by the public sector to find and purchase cloud services via the Digital Marketplace.
The seventh iteration of the framework went live in November 2015 and features more than 22,000 services delivered by 2,566 providers.
Members of the G-Cloud community have previously expressed misgivings to Computer Weekly about joining the Cloud 28+ bandwagon, despite the similarities it shares with the government cloud procurement framework.
Many of these centre on HPE’s insistence that Cloud 28+ suppliers must ensure their offerings run on HPE Helion Openstack, which some considered a sizeable barrier to entry for them.
HPE has stipulated that the Helion Openstack requirement is to ensure users can avoid supplier lock-in and easily move cloud workloads and apps between suppliers.
Xavier Poisson, hybrid IT vice-president for Europe, Middle East and Africa at HPE, said the opening of Cloud 28+ fits well with the European Commission’s digital single market vision.
“Cloud services are fundamental for the growth of the digital economy, and now customers across the EU’s 28 member states and beyond have a single source of hundreds of cloud services that enable them to transform to a hybrid infrastructure.”
Read more about Cloud 28+
- Hewlett-Packard (HP) claims to be on course to meet its target of having 200 independent software suppliers, resellers and service providers participating in its Europe-wide Cloud 28+ project by the end of 2015.
- Hewlett-Packard’s bid to create a Europe-wide one-stop cloud shop has moved up a gear, with the introduction of a self-certification system for providers that want to sell their services through it.
