When it comes to building clouds, the larger hardware providers have a lot a stake when it comes to investing in a platform or portfolio that can help transition them into the next generation of IT services. One of the biggest, HP, has been somewhat quiet on the overall cloud front when compared to some of their industry competition such as IBM, but while they might have been taking their time with a full-fledged cloud play, they have been doing some really great things to make sure their new offering gives them a strong position in the space.

HP Converged Cloud is their latest release, hybrid delivery model and portfolio based on an open, standards-based platform that spans traditional IT, and private, managed and public clouds. The benefit to this type of approach is that the hybrid cloud model allows organizations to expand their current IT environment into the HP cloud seamlessly.

Additionally, the platform provides an on-demand computing instance or or virtual machines and storage. HP is also planning a relational database service for MySQL, and a block storage service that supports movement of data from one compute instance to another.

But one of the best benefits to this type of portfolio is their inclusion of application templates that creates a customized catalog of application services ready for “push-button deployment”. This will help reduce the time to deploy applications, automate management and ensures network service levels in delivering cloud and virtualized applications.

For organizations with HP platforms already in place, this cloud model is a great option which provides an open model to support multiple hypervisors and operating systems with the management and security options delivered through a single common interface. As I said yesterday, for organizations looking to build their own internal clouds, but want the flexibility to expand into a hybrid cloud as an option, using a model like HP and their Converged Cloud offering is a great solution to look at.