The open-stack cloud is riding a train that it hopes to be success-bound. With cloud computing altering the course of the corporate landscape, with open source standards as the anchor of these changes, businesses are now looking at potent affiliates to get parts of the job done. One of the many organizations betting on the open stack is Hewlett-Packard.

Seasoned Analyst at Wikibon.org Dave Vellante shares his insights on HP’s current strategy with plans to make the cloud simple and accessible for customers.  “HP has a different approach,” he says. “Because it allows customers to mix and match components it can compete on the basis of converged infrastructure while at the same time not forcing customers into a single stack approach. Clearly lock-in with the HP strategy is less than with the other approaches.”

Vellante dug deep into the converged stack, looking at how the big names in the industry are adopting the varying levels of value and risk of customers. He made mention of the three essential factors of today’s enterprises: management simplification, cost efficiency and speed to deployment. Among the three key players, Oracle has the most closed and the cohesive throughout the hardware, software and applications stack. HP offers the opposite, allowing more combinations of infrastructure components. Sitting somewhere between the first two is VCE’s principle.

HP hasn’t been out of the limelight for a long while now. From the time they experienced financial turmoil and a heavy-handed court combat with Oracle, up to their relentless pursuit to get back into a strong market position, the company’s focus remains around storage. At the recent HP Discover event, cloud storage solutions took up a good portion of related news and discussions. The company pushes forward with this goal, sharpening up with VMware’s storage weapons.

HP is growing in the cloud storage arena—a space that truly matters. While it is no easy task to manage services within an unified system, the company has fired up their storage solutions via VMware integration and targeting the SMB IT market.