The IT services business is evolving from the old outsourcing model – “your mess for less” – to a rapidly changing universe of discrete services that fit together and help customers manage the new speed of business, HP VP of Data Center Services Rob Taylor said at HP Discover 2011 this week.

“Businesses are threatened every day in their existence, by new competitors and new technologies,” Taylor told Wikibon.org’s co-founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle.com founder John Furrier in the Cube. “You can’t afford to have a strategy that’s five years long – it has to be responsive now. That’s why discrete services, the ability to tie those together into a value chain, really becomes the way of doing business going forward.”

A key part of HP’s services strategy is to automate as much as possible, to take cost out and speed up key processes. “The old outsourcing way of doing it was to take the mess out of the organization and return it at 20% less than it used to cost,” said Taylor. But businesses have to move faster and drive more efficiencies these days, he noted.

HP also announced some services around 3PAR at Discover this week, integrating the technology into its Storage Services offering, as well as rolling out assessment, data migration and architectural design services for 3PAR technology. HP also announced HP Cloud Discover Workshops and Hybrid Cloud delivery services.

The company recently made some management changes in its services business, a unit that was blamed for hurting HP’s overall quarterly results in the company’s most recent earnings call.