HP to shutter Helion Public Cloud to refocus on hybrid infrastructures

HP announced on Wednesday that it will shutter its Helion Public Cloud for good.

"We have made the decision to double down on our private and managed cloud capabilities," wrote Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager for HP Cloud, in a blog post announcing the news.

Hybrid infrastructures are "the future of enterprise IT," Hilf wrote, and HP will investing in its Helion OpenStack platform, which powered its Helion CloudSystem private cloud offering.

Its Helion Public Cloud is set to close all its doors on 31 January 2016.

According to commentators, that was a significant retreat for HP, and comes only two weeks before the company splits into two parts.

While rivals like IBM and Oracle continued to build public cloud services, HP will choose a track more similar to Dell and partner to offer a choice of public cloud offerings.

"Our customers are telling us that the lines between all the different cloud manifestations are blurring," Hilf said. "We will move to a strategic, multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities."

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

"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 added.

According to commentators the decision does not come as, as over the past year HP had slowly shifted investments away from the public cloud, according to Jillian Freeman, senior analyst with Technology Business Research, Inc, in Hampton, New Hampshire.

"Speaking with customers, you can kind of get a sense that HP Helion, in the public cloud space, wasn't taking off," Freeman said. "They put so much money into it and it didn't end up meeting expectations."

HP had not been alone in trying to replicate the  success of Amazon Web Services (AWS), but it was smart to back away and focus more on the areas it had had success with around hybrid and private cloud, Freeman said.

HP is preparing to power ahead in the cloud arena, with plans to invest $1 billion (£590 million) in open source cloud technology over the next two years. (See: HP to invest $1 bn in open source cloud technology).