HP Cloud Services Aim to Help Service Providers Reach SMBs

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

HP today announced enhancements to its hybrid delivery cloud solutions aimed at helping telecom companies reach small and medium business customers. This comes just a day after HP revealed that it’s offering customers financial assistance to help them adopt cloud communications.

New is HP Cloud Services Enablement for Communications as a Service, which is part of the broader HP CSE for CSP (News - Alert) portfolio that also includes solutions for Infrastructure as a Service and Device Management as a Service.

HP CSE for CaaS is targeted at wireless, wireline and broadband network operators that want to act as a single source of  messaging, collaboration and automated voice services for SMBs. As a result, HP says, SMBs will be able to have more predictable and affordable spending related to such services, and lower their investment risks related to them. Meanwhile, for service providers, the new HP offering can allow for the quick introduction of new services.

“CSPs can drive revenue from the growing cloud-based services market with these new HP solutions,” says David Sliter, vice president and general manager of Communications and Media Solutions at HP Enterprise Services. “HP CaaS, along with HP’s ability to bridge IT and telecom requirements, enables CSPs to get to market quickly with ‘pay as you go,’ on-demand services that SMBs need.”

The new offer has three pre-integrated services. That includes e-mail, calendar, contact management, integrated voice mail and e-mail archiving based on Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange 2010. It also includes collaboration based on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Also, HP has pre-integrated systems based on the HP Network Interactive Voice Response, including Auto Attendant, Virtual Office Receptionist, Automatic Call Distribution and Call Recorder.

As noted above, these new cloud offers come a day after HP talked about its efforts around offering financing for cloud services. HP Financial Services yesterday announced it is making up to $2 billion available to help clients finance cloud initiatives.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Summit, collocated with TMC’s (News - Alert) ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. The Cloud Communications Summit will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. To register, click here.