HP rebuffs talk of public cloud exit

Senior exec says media comments have been misinterpreted

HP has insisted it is not exiting the public cloud market despite media speculation to the contrary.

Referring to a New York Times interview he gave last week, HP executive Bill Hilf said in a blog post published last night that the media had misinterpreted "a quote of mine in the press".

In the article, Hilf was quoted as saying it made "no sense" for HP to go head to head with public cloud giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, comments that were construed by some as a sign that HP is exiting the market.

Keen to clear up the confusion, Hilf, who is senior vice president of product management for HP's Helion cloud portfolio, insisted that HP had not changed direction over cloud since it unveiled Helion last May.

"Today, this strategy and vision continues full force," he said.

"In the past week, a quote of mine in the media was interpreted as 'HP is exiting the public cloud', which is not the case."

Hilf stressed that HP operates "one of the largest OpenStack-based public clouds" through Helion, as well as operating a "fast-growing" hosted, virtual private cloud.

"The bottom line is HP Helion offers customers choice across hybrid delivery models: public, managed (hosted), or private. And we have seen great success with this strategy over the past year proven with great customers, such as Deutsche Bank, Fox, Telefonica, and Societe Generale," he said.

Hilf did concede that enterprises often use a combination of providers other than HP, including AWS, Google, Azure and Alibaba.

"We believe the ability to support and integrate different public cloud environments and services is an essential part of hybrid delivery for the enterprise," he explained.

"Today, we are building a portfolio of offerings in support of hybrid delivery for enterprise internal service providers, including the ability to partner with public cloud providers - spanning pure public clouds, telecom providers and local managed services companies. We are not doing pure public cloud only. We are not changing our strategy."