Chinese Firm to Stand Up HP Helion Community Clouds in China

HP has partnered with Chinese content delivery and cloud services company Beijing UnionRead Information Technology to build and operate HP Helion cloud infrastructure for enterprise customers based on OpenStack.

Chinese regulations make it difficult for foreign companies to do business in China unless they do it together with a Chinese partner. UnionRead is the first provider in the country to deploy Helion solutions – a cloud services portfolio HP unveiled as part of a $1 billion investment program in May.

HP has been doing business in China since the mid-80s and has hundreds of private cloud customers in the country, Robert Mao, chairman of the China region for HP, said.

UnionRead will stand up Helion community clouds. These are clouds shared by companies doing business within certain industry verticals or geographies.

The idea is to provide a shared infrastructure to a set of customers with similar security, privacy, performance and compliance needs. A dedicated UnionRead team will build, operate and support these community clouds.

The clouds will provide services in all three of the big cloud infrastructure services categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service.

HP Executive Vice President and CTO Martin Fink said he thought community clouds would be successful in China with certain “communities of interest,” such as automotive supply chain companies or city governments.

UnionRead Chairman Peng Yang added healthcare, education, transportation and finance verticals to the list.