[5] The HP Public Cloud Beta that went live in May 2012 included OpenStack technology-based storage and content delivery network (CDN) components.

[7] The two business units were merged in late 2013 and announced at the HP Discover event in Barcelona, Spain.

[13] The decision of which to use is based on several factors, such as whether the company operates in a highly regulated sector, such as the pharmaceuticals industry that must comply with rules regarding the control and security of data, or if the business must bring services to market quickly, such as a web applications developer.

[16] For instance, a public cloud may be a more cost-effective service for the compute-intensive task of processing analytics, but the data would remain local, or private, to comply with regulations.

[16] Because a hybrid delivery strategy lets organizations run applications and services across different clouds, collocation, and data centers, an example benefit of such a delivery mechanism is that organizations can move an app from one geographic location to another in major storms.

[20] A best practice for avoiding cloud migration problems is to use a management platform that can support applications in any environment a user organization is likely to use.

[23] According to research conducted by HP in 2013, 43 percent of companies surveyed indicated that they wanted strategic guidance on how to deploy cloud.

[24] In a 2013 competitive vendor analysis report by International Data Corporation, a market research firm, the authors state that cloud professional services can help companies map out both a short-term and a long-term strategy for how to use cloud in a way that aids their business goals.

[25] HP Cloud follows the premise of converged infrastructure: the integration of compute, storage, and networking components and technologies into self-provisioning pools of shared resources, and supported by IT services.

[26] One of the benefits of a data center based on converged infrastructure, including a converged infrastructure data center that delivers cloud services, is that manual tasks can be automated, thus reducing the time and cost to carry them out.

[30] The support for open standards technology enables user organizations to employ a hybrid delivery strategy for their cloud consumption.

[34] HP Professional Services consultants work with user organizations to help them create cloud environments.

[41] In November 2013, HP Enterprise Services opened in Barcelona the first of two planned data centers to host VPC in Spain.

[42] According to published reports, the data centers provide disaster recovery services and high availability.

[42] Acting as an investment partner in the project, the government of Catalonia has stated that it intends to use the HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud to reduce by 25 to 30 percent the costs of its Centre for Telecommunications and Information Technology.

[42] The offshore drilling company Seadrill migrated its worldwide data center operations to HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud in July 2013.

According to published reports, Seadrill chose the HP product over competing IBM and Capgemini products because it believed the HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud was less expensive and configured so that Seadrill could continue to run legacy applications in its own physical data center.

[37] UNIT4 Business Software announced in February 2014 that it has contracted to use HP Helion Managed Virtual Private Cloud as a secure method to deliver services to its education clients in the United Kingdom.