For months, we’ve heard the rumblings about HP’s public cloud. Insiders have been offering invites.  HP’s intentions have been no secret,  but now it is official. The HP Public cloud will open to the public on May 10.

The move is part of HP’s intent to be a public cloud services provider and marry that with its private and hybrid cloud strategies.

The HP Public Cloud is similar to Amazon Web Services in some respects but the difference is in HP’s idea of how the traditional enterprise fits into the model. Aspects of it are built on OpenStack.

HP’s real intent here is to marry traditional on-premise infrastructure with a public cloud. That’s where the services come into play. HP’s Pete Karloczak said in an interview last week that it will offer the traditional outsourcing services for long term, managed contracts. It will also offer a self-service model with server management.  On top of its  infrastructure offering, HP is adding messaging and collaboration through its partnership with Microsoft and Office 365. It will eventually provide voice over IP and managed mobility. From there, it plans to layer discovery services and archiving.

There is so much money in helping customers draw down their data centers. Customers do not want to own data centers anymore. They want services that allows them to run test and development in a public cloud and mission critical in a private cloud environment.

The channel? They hold the golden keys. They control the business. They will become increasingly important for HP, IBM, EMC, Dell and the rest. So what does that mean? All of these solutions HP wants to offer will depend on how well they can execute in the channel. The cloud is disruptive but keeping the channel happy will mean a fine dance for these enterprise giants.