HP calls it quits in public cloud battle

HP is shutting down its Helion public cloud platform come January, bowing out of the public cloud battle which saw it going head to head with AWS, Microsoft and Google.

Bill Hilf, HP cloud senior vice president and general manager, says the company will instead double down on its private and managed cloud capabilities, and look to partners to provide any public cloud capabilities.

"Our customers are consistently telling us that in order to meet their full spectrum of needs, they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud, as well as access to SaaS applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads," Hilf says. "In addition, they are pushing for delivery of these solutions faster than ever before.

Hilf says the vendor will continue to invest in its HP Helion OpenStack platform, but will sunset its Helion public cloud offering on January 31, 2016.

"Public cloud is also an important part of our customers' hybrid cloud strategy, and our customers are telling us that the lines between all the different cloud manifestations are blurring," he says.

"Customers tell us they want the ability to bring together multiple cloud environments under a flexible and enter-rise-grade hybrid cloud model. In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, will will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers.

Hilf says HP has already added greater support for AWS as part of its hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus, and has worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure.

"We also support our PaaS customers, wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure," he says.

Hilf says the company will have 'some very exciting announcements' on the managed and virtual private cloud fronts 'in the coming weeks'.

While Amazon, Microsoft and Google have all found success in the public cloud arena, it is an area where HP has struggled, with the company downplaying public cloud in recent times – despite what had been a fairly aggressive push into the market just a couple of years ago.