HP, the public cloud's Johnnie-come-lately, made its first public cloud services available in public beta Thursday and, to make up for lost time HP is going to charge utility prices to use the beta albeit at half what it'll cost when it goes GA.

The widgetry, which reportedly went to private beta in September, is not the homegrown cloud of HP's dreams that it was working on a year ago. It frankly didn't have the technology in-house to build it and was lucky that the open source effort to produce the OpenStack public cloud infrastructure came along.

Of course, OpenStack is not supposed to be quite ready primetime yet so HP's widgetry will stay a beta until it proves it can scale and HP can figure out its SLAs.

In beta now are an EC2-like HP Cloud Compute, an S3-like HP Cloud Object Storage and HP Cloud Content Delivery Network, a thin line up against the cloud king, Amazon, and its ever-expanding portfolio of services. The Content Delivery Network is HP's way of caching data for fast transfers via Akamai.

It's unclear when HP might be able to muster a promised MySQL database and Amazon-like block storage.

HP is praying developers, ISVs, and particularly the enterprise - a relative green field as far as the cloud goes - use it to build next-generation web apps. Of course that might be in preference to HP's private CloudSystem, reportedly a multibillion-dollar business, but that's always the risk. Any private OpenStack clouds HP builds for the enterprise will be compatible with its public cloud or any other OpenStack cloud, ergo the makings of a hybrid solution.

HP's also betting it can separate start-ups from AWS. Guess we'll see.

Pricing is at http://hpcloud.com/pricing.

Nearly 40 companies have announced support for HP Cloud Services and HP expects to have a Cloud Services Marketplace, where customers can access HP Cloud Services and partner solutions through a single account.

Its partners include PaaS partners such as ActiveState, CloudBees, Corent Technology, CumuLogic, Engine Yard and Gigaspaces and storage, management and database providers. The list includes Otopy, PXL and SendGrid for applications; CloudOpt, EnterpriseDB and Xeround for databases; Soasta and Spirent for development and testing; BitNami, CloudSoft, enStratus, Kaavo, RightScale, ScaleXtreme, Smartscale Systems and Standing Cloud for management; FeedHenry and Kinvey for mobile; New Relic for monitoring; Dome9 and SecludIT for PaaS security; CloudBerry Lab, Gladinet, Panzura, Riverbed Technology, SMEStorage, StorSimple, TwinStrata and Zmanda for storage; and Opscode and Zuora for technology. The partner network is supposed to provide tools, best practices and support.