By Mark Davison at Discover 2013, Barcelona – Having decided that a hybrid cloud model is the way forward, HP is now gearing itself up to take this market by storm, investing massively in R&D, new products and personnel.

Margaret Dawson, vice-president, product marketing and cloud evangelist, HP Cloud Services, won’t disclose just how much spend will go towards cloud computing, but she does say that now the foundation is in place, the company is “all in”.

“We don’t break the numbers out,” Dawson says. “But cloud is obviously a very important part of the Enterprise Group where we will be investing a lot. It will be our single biggest investment we’ll be making this year.

“We’re now kicking into gear,” she says. “We’re in [cloud], and we’re all in. In the last six to eight months we’ve really moved to that next level – it’s almost like HP Cloud 2.0 – and we’re also hiring aggressively across a bunch of key markets, especially people with an open standards background.”

Dawson is also confident that the company can maintain, if not better, it’s 60% year on year growth in the cloud.

“I think we’ll see even faster growth over the next two years,” she says. “I think that over the next two to five years the expectations around cloud are massive and we’re not on the sidelines – we’ve in this market to win it.”