HP to axe public cloud offering

HP to 'sunset' Helion Public Cloud next year as vendor doubles down on private cloud

Just six months after denying reports of a market exit, HP has confirmed it will "sunset" its HP Helion Public Cloud offering next year.

Back in April, HP executive Bill Hilf insinuated that HP no longer saw public cloud as a priority when he told the New York Times that it made "no sense" for HP to go head to head with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Hilf hastily backtracked on this, and in a blog at the time insisted that although his quotes had been interpreted as "HP is exiting the public cloud", this was not the case. Hilf added that HP operates "one of the largest OpenStack-based public clouds" through Helion.

But in a blog post published yesterday, Hilf confirmed that the reports he denied six months ago were actually correct – or at least are correct now – and that Helion Public Cloud is indeed for the chop.

In the post, Hilf said HP has made the decision to "double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities" and confirmed that HP will "sunset" Helion Public Cloud on 31 January 2016.

Public cloud remains relevant to HP as part of its hybrid cloud strategy, but the vendor will now work with multiple partners such as Amazon to satisfy its customers' public cloud needs.

"In order to deliver on this demand with best-of-breed public cloud offerings, we will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, as a component of how we deliver these hybrid cloud solutions to enterprise customers," Hilf confirmed.

"Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on 31 January 2016."

HP has already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of its hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus, Hilf explained. It has also worked with Microsoft to support Office 365 and Azure, he added.

"We also support our PaaS customers wherever they want to run our Cloud Foundry platform – in their own private clouds, in our managed cloud, or in a large-scale public cloud such as AWS or Azure," Hilf said.

HP committed to investing more than $1bn (£647m) in its cloud business over two years when it unveiled its Helion range of OpenStack-based cloud products and services last May.