HP Helion Public Cloud Becomes Dust in the Wind
HP has announced that it will exit the public cloud market by early 2016. HP says that its discontinuation of the Helion public cloud lineup is designed as a refocus on what the company does best. Sources say that the hardware giant will be doubling down on, you guessed it, hardware, as well as managed support for enterprises.
Perhaps some of you are too young to remember a classic rock song called “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas. The lyrics to that song seem to come to mind when thinking about HP’s exit from public cloud. It wasn’t too long ago that HP pledged a billion dollar investment into cloud services.
HP has hinted earlier this year that they may step away from public cloud, as it was evident that HP’s Helion public cloud lineup wasn’t coming anywhere close to putting a dent in Microsoft, IBM or Amazon’s public cloud market share. The official last day for HP’s public cloud services will be on January 31st, 2016.
HP says that they will still invest in OpenStack technology. In a blog post announcing the news to the world, HP’s senior vice president of cloud Bill Hilf wrote:
“We have made the decision to double-down on our private and managed cloud capabilities.”
Hilf goes on to say, “We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies.”
Industry analysts reacted as you would expect to the news, citing the fact that Amazon, Microsoft and others have virtually conquered the public IaaS market. Just like that, HP’s public cloud endeavors are nothing more than dust in the wind.
