Hewlett-Packard, which has announced big plans in cloud computing business, will open two data centres in India — most probably in Hyderabad and Chennai — as it brings in the cloud platform this year.

Though it has been offering cloud solutions in a small way, HP said it is going to use the channel partner method to tap the Indian market. It has initiated talks with prospective clients and channel partners.

“We have just launched IT infrastructure-as-a-service in Australia. In the Asia-Pacific region, we are going to introduce the same in India, China and Singapore this year,” Mr Bradden Wondra, Chief Technology Officer (Enterprise Services, APAC) of HP, said.

Addressing a media conference in Singapore on Friday, he said, the company would invest $1 billion to build data centres. Some of them would be built in association with channel partners.

Mr Mohan Krishnan, General Manager (Technology Consulting) of HP Technology Services for APAC region, said the company would target big corporations for private cloud (services offered on client's premises) and small and medium businesses for public cloud.

Either way, companies could save 20-40 per cent in operational expenditure, the HP officials claimed. The company is working with Godrej and Aditya groups to build private clouds. It is engaged in talks with some leading diversified businesses too build private clouds, while it hopes to sell public cloud services to SMBs.

Open cloud market

Like in telecom services segment, HP said it would soon create an AppStore (application store) allowing its customers to take to commonly needed applications, according to Mr Aman Neil Dokania, Vice-President and General Manager (Cloud and Virtualisation Solutions, APAC region) of HP, said.

As part of its India cloud strategy, HP will hold ‘Cloud Discovery Workshops' one at a time with each company to understand and advise cloud solutions.

Mr Bradden said advent of mobile communication devices would drive cloud utility. “Organisations are more comfortable with mobile devices rather than laptops when their staff use them for office work,” he said.

While laptops save cache information on hard disks thus leaving scope for loss of data, mobile devices access the applications over the Net but do not save information.

The trip was sponsored by HP.