With HP Discover just over the horizon–happening December 4-6 in Frankfurt, Germany–it’s a good time to start looking at what products and services that HP has to offer that directly impact the work done in DevOps. The cloud is an important and growing market for a multitude of development teams and at the same time it presents the secondary issue of stewardship of shipped products deployed in the cloud itself.

IDC projected the worldwide software market has grown 4.7% year-over-year, reaching a total market size of $167 billion for the first half of 2012. The Applications segment, which holds almost 49% of overall market share, was the fastest growing market group with a 5.1% year-over-year growth rate.  Application Development and Deployment (AD&D) and System Infrastructure Software registered significant growth as well.

There is a dramatic shift going on in the enterprise, where the cloud has made it easier to access services, apps and information, anywhere and anytime.

In the industry’s commitment to provision the cloud infrastructure business, HP jumped into the game with the launch of its HP Converged Cloud architecture. This combines the capabilities of the private, hybrid and public clouds, and allows them to merge with the traditional IT environment.

HP Converged Cloud is an industry first, with a portfolio of solutions designed to help companies create a hybrid environment, and more importantly, effectively manage them. Rather than the legacy infrastructure model, in which compute, storage, and networking resources are all built as discrete silos within the data center, a converged model integrates these three facets into a cohesive whole.

All solutions in the HP Converged Cloud portfolio are based on a common architecture and offer a thought-out strategy, which aims to extend capabilities of cloud computing to the entire IT environment (including infrastructure, applications, and data storage), accelerate innovation, improve business agility and reduce costs.

The HP Converged Cloud provides a number of obvious advantages for the enterprise, including an open, standardized platform with support for multiple hypervisors, operating systems, development environments, heterogeneous infrastructures and a large partner ecosystem; management and protection of information, applications, and infrastructure; and optimizes use of standard modular components.

It also brings together an array of products, including HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Converged Management and Security, HP Converged Information and hardened OpenStack technology. Especially important in an era where cybersecurity is becoming a bigger and bigger slice of the risk and overhead pie when it comes to deployment.

HP CloudSystem

In particular, HP CloudSystem provides an integrated and open platform for enterprises to build and manage services across private, managed and public cloud environments. It delivers instant access to additional capacity through HP Cloud Services, Amazon Web Services and Savvis.

HP CloudSystem combines the power of HP Converged Infrastructure and benefits of HP Cloud Service Automation software. The platform is a fully integrated end-to-end, consisting of hardware, software and deployment tools to build and manage cloud services environments through private, public and hybrid cloud.

This software is a universal mechanism to ensure safety and compliance with regulations for all applications, as well as physical and virtual infrastructure. The solution supports HP Cloud Maps, pre-configured system of cataloged objects, which automatically performs the optimal allocation of resources to applications and infrastructure.

A new version of HP Cloud Service Automation offers a self-service portal to assist customers increase agility and reduce costs when managing application and infrastructure services on HP CloudSystem-based solutions or third-party environments. IT can support a complex heterogeneous environment and allow you to manage that and allocate that using the tools.

Solutions for DevOps

The applications are getting more dynamic, as is the infrastructure, with virtualized environments. Within enterprises, the shift towards the DevOps model is very much a reflection of the change from the days of monolithic application development. Implementing a DevOps strategy could mean using software to align the development and operations teams’ strategies, to create a kind of virtual DevOps team.

HP is expanding its capabilities with regards to DevOps with its Application Performance Management 9.2 for Converged Cloud that helps customers manage across converged cloud environments, improving the performance management of cloud and mobile applications.

Along with updated versions of HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and HP Performance Center (PC), HP DevOps solutions for big data offer the continuous delivery of applications, with new Lab Management Automation and Continuous Application Performance Delivery features.

Authors: Kyt Dotson and Saroj Kar contributed to this story.