Hewlett-Packard is competing with EMC, IBM and Dell over the big companies and government agencies that are keeping up with the latest in IT.  Throughout the past few months the hardware vendor has been consistently reinforcing its portfolio with new infrastructure solutions that address the three big trends in the market.  This week marked a major milestone for HP with the unveiling of several updates and new products, putting to work its range of technology and talent it’s been acquiring in recent years.  The result is a unified architecture that’s been revamped for simplicity sake, marking HP’s claim in the converged infrastructure space alongside its anxious rivals.

Big data

HP invested a great deal in this sector, primarily through the acquisition of  Vertica and Autonomy.  In spite of some financial troubles caused by the latter deal, HP is pushing through with a solid offering that combines IP from both companies in a single package branded as the Next Generation Information Optimization solution.

The vendor is also making use of technology from IBRIX, a 2009 acquisition that has been relabeled as StoreAll.  This line-up consists of an embedded metadata management system called StoreAll Express Query and StoreAll Storage, a 16-petabyte monster platform for unstructured information.  The latter focuses not only on scale but also automation, which is another huge priority for HP.

This brings us to the second vertical the vendor is actively targeting.

DevOps

HP carried over this focus on simplicity to the cloud department, where it’s pushing solutions that make it easier for IT departments to implement new service models. The  HP Converged Cloud portfolio combines products from several HP product families to create a standardized architecture that enables a much more agile, and dynamic environment; one that brings operations and developers closer together.

Services

Hewlett-Packard is also putting an emphasis on the high-margin services market. The newly announced StoreServ 7000 combines the best  of both words: the “self-configuring, self-provisioning and self-optimizing” box is offered up with three dedicated services that installation and optimization across the board.

The hardware giant also has a particularly extensive line-up of consultative offerings directed at the financial industry, and Capacity on Demand is the latest and perhaps most notable addition to HP Financial Services.

The solution revolves around a monthly payment structure that bills the user for on-premise storage usage: once a client organization runs out of capacity, they order more and receive access to a “Base Buffer” until the hardware arrives at the designated site.