HP Admits It Can’t Compete ‘Head-To-Head’ With Big Public Cloud Players

Hewlett-Packard’s SVP of the Helion cloud platform has admitted that the company cannot compete with the public cloud’s biggest players, saying that the move makes “no sense” in an interview with the New York Times.

Set to split into two companies in October, one focused on consumer hardware and printers and one focussed on enterprise technology, HP never managed to begin to make a move on cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

No sense

Bill Hilf told the New York Times: “We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.”

In an email to VentureBeat, a HP spokesperson then said: “HP is not leaving the public cloud market. We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud out there. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.”

It increasingly looks as though HP’s cloud customers will now be cloud providers themselves, albeit on a much smaller level. HP’s move on the OpenStack market last year produced HP Helion, made up of a portfolio of OpenStack cloud products and services designed to help businesses build, manage and consume workloads in hybrid IT environments.

HP spent more than $1 billion on this project, but has so far failed to make ripples in the ever-consolidating cloud waters.

UPDATE

HP has issued a follow up statement on the matter, it reads:

“HP is not leaving the public cloud market. We run the largest OpenStack technology based public cloud in the U.S. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players. In EMEA our strategy remains unchanged. We continue to work with our partners – resellers, Service Providers, ISVs, etc. – to deliver hybrid cloud solutions to our customers. In fact, we have launched the Cloud28+ community to unite all of these different players with the goal of expanding cloud adoption and the uptake of business cloud services across the region."

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