HP and Microsoft fall under the category of major enterprise technology providers along with Cisco, IBM, Oracle, SAP and VMWare/EMC. With an eye on projected cloud computing revenue growth, they are all looking at ways to expand their cloud computing presence in order to avoid being overtaken by this transformational change.
These two companies made announcements recently that caught my attention (but there are more):

• HP announced the purchase of Vertica followed by embracing OpenStack and CloudFoundry as part of their cloud offerings.
• Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and others announced their support of Hadoop

These announcements give open source offerings and enterprise technology providers end-to-end stack support. Open source gives HP a less expensive way of moving into the software market outside the systems management domain. While many customers are wary of open source due to the lack of support, HP can help remove that barrier.

Other avenues of new possibilities are partnerships that enterprise technology providers and domain experts can collaborate together on. Companies like GE are getting into software development as evidenced by their recent win at Norfolk Southern to develop a software system for fleet management and train traffic analytics. GE could build this software on open source supported by HP and together they could deliver a solution with a higher profit margin compared to non-open source platforms.

Cloud computing has transformational potential but open source can make it revolutionary.