Hewlett-Packard is moving into direct competition with Amazon and other companies that essentially rent computing services to businesses on an as-needed basis. Although it hasn't been a big player in the "public cloud" business, where established competitors include Amazon, Microsoft and other companies, including telecommunications providers like Verizon. IBM and Oracle also have cloud offerings. The move is part of a broader strategy under CEO Meg Whitman to take advantage of the cloud computing trend, in which businesses and consumers are increasingly storing and accessing information and services over the Internet.
HP planned to officially launch its "public cloud" service for startups and large organizations that want to use HP's data centers for a variety of computing tasks. In addition to computing capacity, the service will include software tools that Web-based businesses and other companies can use to build and run programs, and even move programs from their own data centers to HP's. It
