HP has now jumped on the bandwagon as a cloud service provider with HP Cloud. Here is an excerpts from Senior VP of HP Cloud services:

On When OpenStack Reached Its Tipping Point: My thesis: The day Canonical shifted Ubuntu’s cloud bet from Eucalyptus to OpenStack, it was a wake up call for small vendors that were still getting ready to make their bets. “I would completely agree,” replied Singh. “A bunch of private cloud guys have been at it [trying to develop platforms] for awhile but OpenStack caught up and passed them. We’ve been impressed with CloudStack and we’re glad to see it moving along, and we’re happy to see Eucalyptus working with Amazon. But look at the ecosystem and OpenStack looks impressive.”

On How HP Will Differentiate from Other Cloud Providers: “With all due respect to Rackspace, we’re a little larger and we have a global reach. And we’ll address that reach in the cloud as well.”

In terms of HP’s secret sauce, “Nobody is ever going to turn away from a secure, business-driven, SLA_driven cloud service,” said Singh. “I challenge you: Who is delivering that type of cloud today? Amazon Web Services has a lot of stickiness but folks are saying ‘I need more tools and I need good, old fashion service.”

HP will differentiate above the IaaS level, focusing on platform as a service, database as a service, and analytics as a service, he added. “Standing up VMs is so 2009. It’s time to stand up quality clouds, tools, APIs, and service that scale. We’ll offer a complete stack of services, and we’ll give you a complete [cloud] marketplace on top of that.”

Read more of the interview of Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh, senior VP and GM of HP Cloud Services.