HP has brought its partner programs for cloud solution providers to Canada. First announced at the company’s Global Partner Conference in March, the programs include offerings for those who build and operate clouds, and those who seek to resell HP’s own public cloud offerings.

HP Canada has announced the launch in Canada of three partner programs – Cloud Builder for those who build and operate hybrid and private cloud, and reseller options for both HP’s Public Cloud and Managed Cloud Service. These programs have been available in the U.S. since last year.

“The opportunity here is not just selling virtual compute, storage, and networking, it’s the integration and the ISV community that exists around it,” said Randy Milthorpe, business development manager for HP Cloud at HP Canada.

The company is also in the process of launching its managed cloud offering in Canada to go with the new reseller program. Under that service, HP managed CloudSystem deployments located in a data centre, whether that location is owned by HP, by the partner, or by the customer. But in all cases, the partner retains the relationship with the customer.

“The partner has the base relationship with the end user customers, and we operate as a service provider,” Milthorpe said.

Partners interested in getting the Cloud Builder training and certification will be able to get trained up included with admission to the company’s HP Discover event next month in Las Vegas. Training will also be available apart from Discover.

Data residency is always an issue with public cloud offerings. Currently, HP maintains a virtual private cloud offering that was resident in Canada, while its true public cloud offerings are all hosted in the United States, in “Americas West” and “Americas East” zones. Milthorpe suggested that lack of Canadian data residency doesn’t work against HP, suggesting that for many there is an increasing sense that when it comes to spies and hackers, “your data isn’t safe anywhere,” so workloads that are sensitive are not likely to find their way to the cloud anyway.

The launch of the programs times nicely with the launch of HP’s Helion cloud offensive, a $1 billion investment in public, hybrid and private cloud based on HP’s own distribution of the open source OpenStack cloud management platform.