HP To Shut Down Its Public Cloud
As it gets ready to split into two companies in a couple of weeks, HP has confirmed its new enterprise business does not plan to continue its public cloud. HP said it will sunset its public cloud Jan. 31, 2016 which, despite huge ambitions to take on Amazon Web Services and others, never gained ground.
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google have established themselves as the largest global cloud infrastructure providers, and while there a number of other major providers including IBM Softlayer, VMware vCloud Air and Rackspace, their footprints don't currently have the scale and customer base as the big three. Still there are thousands of small and midsize hosting and cloud providers.
The move by HP to shut down its public cloud isn't a huge surprise. Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud, made it official Wednesday. "We have made the decision to double-down on our private and managed cloud capabilities," he said in a blog post yesterday announcing the transition.
As it withdraws from the public cloud business HP will emphasize its HP OpenStack-based Helion platform and CloudSystem private cloud offering. The company will also support customers seeking managed virtual private cloud offerings, he said, adding that HP will have some announcements coming within a few weeks.
"Customer tell us that they want the ability to bring together multiple cloud environments under a flexible and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud model," Hilf said. "In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we 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 added that will include support for Microsoft's Azure public cloud, along with Office 365, and will utilize last year's Eucalyptus acquisition to provide access to Amazon Web Services and will offer PaaS support to Cloud Foundry-based clouds.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 10/22/2015 at 10:18 AM