“This is a very exciting time in the industry,” says Antonio Neri, senior VP and general manager of HP Technical Services. Most HP customers, he said in an interview in the SiliconAngle Cube at HP Discover 2012 (full video below), are still running traditional IT environments and are in some stage of virtualizing their data centers and often looking for help from HP with that process. They are also very conscious of Big Data and interested in where Hadoop/Map Reduce capabilities fit in their futures and how to develop those capabilities. And they are in the process of understanding and developing cloud services, both private and public.

In response, HP Services has announced a Hadoop Workshop Discovery Series to help customers move to Hadoop and understand unstructured information management using Autonomy for unstructured data and Vertica for data analysis. It also announced new services to help customers with virtualization and help them develop an environment-centric approach to running and automating their IT infrastructures to allow them to devote more resources to innovating. These include cloud workshops to help them asses the gaps in their infrastructure and applications as they move to private and hybrid cloud environments.

The HP cloud strategy, he said, “is ingenious, open, and gives customers choices.” It is built on a partner system that can support customers developing private cloud systems and expanding into hybrid clouds, while providing them with a single point-of-contact to manage the entire infrastdructure.

“We like short engagements rather than multi-year projects,” he said. “Most of our consulting engagements are 90-180 days and focused on moving a single project from beginning to end quickly to achieve business value. Then we can move to the next project” on the customer’s list. “A lot of those projects focus on helping customers to optimize data center performance so they can spend more time and resources innovating.”