HP admits cloud platform competition too fierce

April 9, 2015

The Senior Vice President of HP’s Helion cloud project said the move makes “no sense” as the public cloud’s biggest players already dominate the market.

The OEM however also issued a statement affirming that it “is not leaving the public cloud market”, Tech Week Europe reports.

It continued: “We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud in the US. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.”

The technology provider said that its EMEA strategy will remain the same as “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”.

Jonathan Brandon, Editor of Business Cloud News, posted an opinion piece about the news, saying: “It’s a shame HP didn’t pull a ‘Dell’ and publicly get out of the business of directly offering public cloud services to enterprise users, which was a good move.

“Standing up public cloud services is by most accounts an extremely capitally-intensive exercise that a company like HP, given its current state, is simply not best positioned to see through.”

He continued: “HP’s heritage is in hardware – desktops, printers and servers, and servers still present a reasonably large chunk of the company’s revenue, something it has no choice but to keep in mind as it seeks to move up the stack in other areas.” Nonetheless, Brandon also commented that OpenStack is “seeing much more uptake from the private cloud crowd”.

Tech Week Europe posted an opinion poll at the bottom of its story. At the time of writing, 40 percent of respondents said that HP should never have entered the market, while 24 percent were convinced that Helion will eventually become a major competitor.

In May 2014, HP announced it would spend $1 billion (€930 million) on its cloud enterprise in an attempt to “ward off competition”.