Hewlett-Packard has abandoned its plans to join the ranks of top public cloud providers. Instead, the company will concentrate on its private and managed clouds offerings, including support for Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), and Microsoft Azure.
This news comes at the same time that AWS announced its record-breaking financial growth in its most recent quarterly earnings filing. Report after report has already confirmed its dominance in cloud computing. These reports were likely to have influenced HP’s decision not to continue in the public cloud space and to cede it to AWS and Microsoft, as well as Google.
In a blog post last week, Bill Hilf, an HP executive, stated that the HP Helion Public Cloud offering will be discontinued on January 31, 2016. “As we did before, we will assist our customers in designing, building, and running the best cloud environments that suit their needs based on their workloads, their industry and business requirements.”
These needs should be geared towards public cloud computing services.
Hilf stated that customers who need access to large-scale public cloud providers will find it easier to get there with us. Hilf also said that we have partnered with Microsoft to provide support for Office 365 and Azure. “We also support PaaS customers wherever Cloud Foundry is used — in their private clouds, in our managed clouds, or in large-scale public clouds such as AWS and Azure.”
In March, HP updated its Helion offering to include the Eucalyptus cloud tool. HP stated in a statement that Eucalyptus was now part of the HP Helion portfolio. This gives customers the ability to deploy their existing AWS workloads into cloud environments they control (private, managed), and addresses the demand for cost-effective alternatives. “HP Helion Eucalyptus can be used as a private, managed, or hybrid cloud solution to address a wide range of customer requirements.”
In June, Helion added support for AWS compatible private clouds.
HP will now be focusing on private clouds and managed services. Hilf stated that the company has decided to double down on its private and managed cloud capabilities. “We will continue to invest in our HP Helion OpenStack platform and innovate for cloud-enabling software. HP Helion OpenStack has been well-received by customers and runs the industry’s leading private cloud solution, HP Helion CloudSystem. This solution continues to grow its revenue and win new enterprise customers. We will be focusing our cloud services resources on the Managed and Virtual Private Cloud offerings. These offerings will expand and we will make some exciting announcements in the coming weeks.