HP said that its distributor and partner Westcoast will use its Converged Cloud offering to woo the reseller base.
The investment is over £1 million and will mean Westcoast will offer its resellers cloud services, to manage Microsoft Lync, Exchange and SharePoint in the distributors’ IL3 data centre.
The move, said HP, means that Westcoast customers – that is to say its resellers – will be able to use current credit lines as well as take part in a partner programme which includes training and support.
Duncan Forsyth, Westcoast’s MD said that the era of onsite IT is becoming IT in the cloud. “We want to support both,” he said. HP Converged Cloud will let his company deliver IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SaaS (software as a service) for resellers with a minimal need for capital investment.
The system will effectively be based on HP products including Proliant Bladesystem c7000 enclosures with BL460c Gen 8 blades using Intel Xeon chips. The system will also use SoreServ storage systems, HP tape libraries and HP 5400 Switch series.
HP exec Michael Clifford said that managing and using data centres “frighten many resellers” but using its systems will help resellers to see clearly through the mists of the cloud and offer quality cloud services.
