HP, the public cloud’s Johnnie-come-lately, made its first public cloud services available in public beta Thursday and, to make up for lost time HP is going to charge utility prices to use the beta albeit at half what it’ll cost when it goes GA.
The widgetry, which reportedly went to private beta in September, is not the homegrown cloud of HP’s dreams that it was working on a year ago. It frankly didn’t have the technology in-house to build it and was lucky that the open source effort to produce the OpenStack public cloud infrastructure came along.
Of course, OpenStack is not supposed to be quite ready primetime yet so HP’s widgetry will stay a beta until it proves it can scale and HP can figure out its SLAs.