Hewlett-Packard reckons hybrid will be the buzzword of 2011 and hopes that its new suite of cloud offerings will tempt enterprises to shift to a hosted model.

At an event held in London to launch its HP Enterprise Cloud Services Compute platform, David Chalmers, CTO, UK&I, enterprise storage and servers, HP Enterprise Business, said the company’s hybrid approach to cloud computing is one that should chime with today’s businesses.

"Companies have a mix of technology, so the key is to marry it up. There is no blank sheet when you start with cloud computing, that simply doesn’t happen," he said. "You have to take existing technology with you and mix it with cloud-based platforms. Hybrid will be the keyword of 2011, following green in 2009 and cloud in 2010, because it’s the reality of what cloud is for most."

HP labels Enterprise Cloud Services Compute as a "private cloud as a service" run from HP’s data centres near Darlington in the UK and Oklahoma in the US. It is similar to Amazon’s EC2 offering, but with less focus on developers and SMBs, HP claims. It will eventually offer CRM, ERP and other platforms via the service.

It will initially be offered on a subscription model with a pay for what you use model introduced at a later date. Customers will be able to chop and change between the two as they wish, HP confirmed to CBR. It will be offered with 99.9% availability.

Integrated with HP’s Enterprise Cloud Services Compute will be CloudSystem, a new package designed to help companies build their own private cloud. HP said this is new versions of its Converged Infrastructure hardware and software coupled with its systems management tool; Cloud Service Automation.

For those businesses still unsold on the benefits HP has introduced Cloud Discovery Workshops, designed to educate C-level execs about cloud computing. The company has already run around 80 of these workshops and the feedback has generally been positive, Gurprit Singh, CTO, UK&I technology services, HP Enterprise Business said.

Prices had not been revealed at the time of going to press.