Adding to the managed cloud services and private cloud, HP has broken up its cloud services into smaller pieces, allowing businesses to pick and choose what they need. The first part of that, says Neal Clapper, senior vice-president and general manager of Americas Technology Services at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard, is the new HP Cloud Planning Services. "(It's) sitting down with the customer and figuring out what they want to get from their information," she says. "Gathering the data a customer might have and putting it into a form or function that makes sense for (them) and any use they might have and implementing a road map for the customer."

Clapper explained the move as capitalizing on what HP already offered, but trying to make it more efficient for spend. "This is taking the cloud services that we have today and extending the capabilities into smaller chunks," she says, "to enable customers to have more of a selection of (the) services they can use to determine how they'll implement cloud."

And that partitioning of services is not only to help save on IT spend; it also makes things quicker. "Some of the (original) services have nine-week deliverables," said Clapper. "That's too much for some customers to absorb, so we've taken and broken down the services into smaller sets."

That kind of timeliness can be critical if your business is inherently tied to service up-time, like Internet domain registrar giants, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based GoDaddy.com. Its manager of storage, engineering and disaster recovery, Julia Palmer, says there is no room for error in her business. "We needed to pick something that never goes down," she says. "The Internet never sleeps."

A large part of this new cloud strategy is also the process of growing the new HP public cloud enough to take it out of beta.