The newly spun-off tech giant HP Enterprise will be focusing on the “hybrid cloud” business of working with companies to store data both on-site and in outside data centres, chief executive Meg Whitman said following a historic breakup of computing giant Hewlett-Packard.
Whitman also reiterated that the new entity has decided not to compete in public cloud computing.
“It’s a hybrid world out there,” she said. “We decided to not play in the public cloud space anymore because it’s very capital intensive and Amazon is way up in front.”
Over time, she added that it’s likely that “we will end up partnering with Amazon Web Services and the likes.”
Whitman said there could be other deals working with Google and Microsoft, which are also major cloud providers.
“Sometimes you are very good friends with a company and at that same time you also compete,” she said. “I think we all know that in this world, you have to keep both thoughts in your mind.”
In late October, the company announced that on Jan. 31, 2016, it will stop offering its public cloud for running companies’ applications, which currently goes by the brand name Helion.
Then HP senior vice president and general manager Bill Hilf blogged: “We will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on January 31, 2016. As we have before, we will help our customers design, build and run the best cloud environments suited to their needs — based on their workloads and their business and industry requirements.”
It is understood that the company, however, will continue to offer its commercial distributions of the OpenStack open-source cloud software.
DSA believes the decision to ditch public cloud offering is a smart move by HPE. It’s important for them to move forward and re-align their strategy. Clearly, the company is not making any inroads with Helion and the time is right for HPE to be focusing its resources on more gainful venture such as its managed and virtual private cloud offerings.
After all, HP’s public cloud never had any real traction in the market to begin with. Earlier this year, technology analyst firm Gartner excluded the HP cloud from its big report on the infrastructure as a service market, noting that “it no longer has sufficient market share to qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant.”
HP isn’t the first to bow out of the public cloud market or change up its approach. IBM, for instance, scrapped its SmartCloud Enterprise public cloud product when it bought public cloud player SoftLayer. Dell got out of the market years ago, but seemingly re-entered it when the company announced plans to acquire VMware along with its $67 billion EMC purchase.
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