As CEO Meg Whitman closes in on enterprise services, Hewlett-Packard is venturing beyond familiar ground in pursuit of new revenue opportunities. On Tuesday the company pulled the curtains back on Propel, a new freemium cloud offering designed to make IT resources more accessible to end-users.

Propel is a cross-platform ITSM solution that can deliver services “with greater speed, flexibility, responsiveness and efficiency” than traditional alternatives, according to HP. The free edition features a Knowledge Management tool, a standard cloud catalog and an IT news feed. The premium version expands these features and adds “advanced authentication methods” such as single sign-on, as well as integration with on-premise solutions through the Propel Service Exchange. The software also offers a management reference architecture to help traditional IT organizations operate more efficiently.

HP says that Propel enabled E.ON SE, the holding company behind one of the world’s largest investor-owned electric utility service providers, to boost user satisfaction and reduce manual help desk activities by 15 percent.

“As our business becomes more complex, we believe that open framework and consumerized user experience are central to enabling our self-service strategy aimed to improve performance and cost control,” said Edgar Aschenbrenner, the CIO of E.ON. “The implementation of HP Propel service portal is a key step towards transforming our IT organization into a strictly service oriented multi-supplier environment.”

Meg Whitman’s efforts to revitalize HP will inevitably involve job cuts. The vendor said in a statement today that it would lay off 1,124 workers in Britain as part of plans to cut 8 percent of its workforce – 27,000 employees – by the end of 2014. The move follows the appointment of Stuart Bladen as the new head of its UK Public Sector (UKPS) business.