Wants more work with partners, less competition with giants
HP's Helion public cloud infrastructure (IaaS) services will be closing on Jan. 31, 2016, HP Cloud SVP Bill Hilf discloses in a blog post here .
Going forward, HP "will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities," as part of its effort to enable hybrid (integrated public/private) cloud deployments. Hilf reiterates HP's commitment to its private and managed cloud offerings, which leverage software based on the open-source OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform (also backed by Rackspace, IBM, Red Hat, and others). Last year, HP bought Eucalyptus, a provider of open-source IaaS software that competes with OpenStack and integrates well with Amazon Web Services (AWS). HP's decision comes with AWS on a $7bn+/year run rate, and with IaaS rivals such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google also seeing strong growth. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) recently rolled out new services to make it easier for enterprises to migrate workloads to AWS. Meanwhile, VMware just suggested industry adoption of public cloud services is weighing heavily on its results.
Bill Hilf says in his blog: “Over the past several years, HP has built its strategy on the idea that a hybrid infrastructure is the future of enterprise IT. In doing so, we have committed to helping our customers seamlessly manage their business across traditional IT and private, managed or public cloud environments, allowing them to optimize their infrastructure for each application’s unique requirements.”
The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly, he says, hence the move. “Today, 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. In addition, they are pushing for delivery of these solutions faster than ever before.”
To support this new model, HP will continue to aggressively grow the partner ecosystem and integrate different public cloud environments. “To enable this flexibility, we are helping customers build cloud-portable applications based on HP Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform. In Europe, we are leading the Cloud28+ initiative that is bringing together commercial and public sector IT vendors and EU regulators to develop common cloud service offerings across 28 different countries.”
