HPE takes wraps off European cloud catalogue

Cloud28+ designed for European market with privacy in mind

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a new cloud marketplace designed just for the European market, which it claims will help ease concerns about data privacy in the region.

Cloud28+ is a catalogue of enterprise cloud services and it opened for business yesterday, providing a range of cloud offerings including IaaS, PaaS and SaaS products.

The arrival of Cloud28+ is the second big cloud announcement HPE has made this month - at the HPE Discover event in London, chief executive Meg Whitman announced that her firm would work more closely with Microsoft on cloud, with each firm acting as a "preferred partner" to the other in the space.

In a video explaining the Cloud28+ offering, HPE's hybrid IT president for EMEA, Xavier Poisson, said the new offering will be welcome news for firms worried about data residency.

"Cloud28+ is an ecosystem based on open standards, which enables the customer to choose the datacentre location and provider by which a cloud service is operated," he said. "This ensures compliance with local laws and also with business requirements."

Data residency has been a big issue in 2015, culminating in the invalidation of the Safe Harbour Act back in October, as CRN sister site Channelnomics Europe reported. The law once protected transatlantic data transfers involving the personal data of EU citizens, but is now invalid, leaving some US tech vendors scrambling to find a solution to ease the concerns of users and governments.

Around 700 cloud services are already available on the new HPE cloud marketplace, with more being added all the time, according to Poisson. Partners including BT, Carrenza and Computacenter have services offered in the catalogue.

Poisson added that the Cloud28+ offering aims to ensure the enterprise space is as well served as the consumer market when it comes to cloud.

"As consumers, we can tap into a rich ecosystem of apps for our private lives, via our smartphones or tablets," he said. "Until today, the same could not have been said for enterprises searching for apps for their business needs. We have created the Cloud28+ catalogue to fill this gap. The Cloud28+ cloud service catalogue is a centralised app store particularly geared towards European enterprise customers."