In addition to an infrastructure-as-a-service offering, HP will also deliver a marketplace for consumer, small and medium business, and enterprise applications, Apotheker said.

There will be something for every HP customer in the marketplace, he said. "We'll provide a single open market that integrates consumer, enterprise and developer services," he said, speaking at an event held for press and analysts in San Francisco Monday. The cloud marketplace will include an application store, as well as developer tools and enterprise services and support, he said.

, but Apotheker billed the services as open and able to support many development languages, and designed to be used by any software maker. "We will only vet the applications for security and interoperability," he said.

HP already has the know-how to build such offerings. It is well-established as a vendor of consumer and data center technology, as well as the middleware software needed to glue different applications together. It has ambitions to be as large as some of the existing well-known cloud service providers.