07 May 2014 Posted by Paul Burns
Here is my take on the HP Helion cloud computing announcement, using the classic Spaghetti Western movie title, “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” as the framework.
Table of Contents
The Good
- Indemnification for customers is quite helpful. The company says it will protect “customers using HP Helion OpenStack code from intellectual property infringement claims.” While it is not yet clear how much risk there is in this area, enterprise CIOs will certainly appreciate the backing of HP on this front.
- The planned use of Cloud Foundry in a PaaS is interesting. The company says it will develop a “Platform as a Service (PaaS) based on Cloud Foundry, offering IT departments and developers an open platform to build, deploy and manage applications quickly and easily.” HP needs solutions that cater to developers, not just IT operations staff. Time will tell whether this offering has legs.
- HP is still talking the talk and backing it up, at least to some degree (further commentary below), with $1 billion and planned investments. At least the company has not completely abandoned its efforts around IaaS.
The Bad
- Cloud computing, both public and private, remains a come from behind play for HP and the company continues to take the slow road. Planning to hire 200 more employees in Seattle over 18 months – employees that will need to be on boarded, brought up to speed and integrated with project teams – is not exactly the fast path to revenue and market share. Over time, I believe HP needs to do more organic development such as this. However, given the company’s current laggard position in the cloud computing marketplace, I believe it would be more prudent and fruitful to make a strategic acquisition in the public cloud space (e.g. similar to the acquisition of SoftLayer by IBM).
- HP has not made sufficient headway in its public cloud venture. While other companies have acquired existing, revenue-generating cloud service providers to gain significant entry in this space (Verizon acquired Terremark; CenturyLink acquired Savvis; IBM acquired SoftLayer; etc.), HP has focused on organic growth, leaving the company little to show in terms of IaaS revenue. HP appears to be somewhat deemphasizing its public cloud focus – although I’m fairly certain the company would disagree with this perspective. Still, inside the company, many engineers previously assigned to HP’s public cloud have been moved to other cloud initiatives. Some of them – as well as some previous managers – say you can expect that HP will continue with the public cloud offering, but that its priority has been significantly lowered. In my opinion, that aligns with HP’s recent actions around cloud computing.
- There is still way too much that is “yet to come.” Regarding its OpenStack platform, the company says: “An enhanced commercial edition that addresses the needs of global enterprises and service providers will be released in the coming months.” Regarding the HP Helion development platform, “HP plans to release a preview version of later this year.” Later this year. A preview. I expect that HP will only be further behind their competition when these offerings release.
The Ugly
- HP has an increasingly confusing cloud story, with multiple business units generating overlapping solutions. Trying to round them up under a single sub brand called Helion won’t help much. However, over time, the company could move to improve this situation. Still, HP seems to be quickly sweeping past offerings that compete with Helion under the rug. Until very recently, HP said this about its existing OpenStack-based distribution: “Based on OpenStack technology, HP Cloud OS provides the foundation for the HP Cloud common architecture across private, public, and hybrid cloud delivery. It is the world’s first OpenStack based cloud technology platform for hybrid delivery.” A bit of a stretch in the first place, but how does it reconcile with these new words about Helion: “The first enterprise-grade OpenStack distribution from HP.” Come on HP… Those are weasel words. You had an OpenStack distribution that you claimed formed the foundation of your cloud efforts. Now you have different one. How are these products reconciled for existing users? What is the future of Cloud OS? Why should anyone believe that a new OpenStack distribution will be any more successful?
- HP continues to lag Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the public IaaS space. This is true for other public cloud providers as well, but HP is also significantly behind IBM – a key competitor among the traditional hardware vendors. Unlike IBM, HP is also still heavily tied to commodity servers and PCs. Its announcement last week to partner with Foxconn on extremely low-priced servers does little to change that and opens the company up to new risks in the future.
- HP continually changes its cloud strategy. A steady stream of leaders and VPs with cloud computing in their titles seems to make cloud strategy announcements, only to be overturned by other cloud strategy announcements months down the road.
Do you agree? Disagree? Have something to add? Please add your thoughts in the comments below.
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