Comments on: Can HP jumpstart its cloud computing effort?

By: Keith Townsend

Keith Townsend — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:00:45 +0000

I’ve long said I don’t understand HP’s cloud strategy and how they plan on not cannibalizing their hardware business in the process. HP is in the position to offer a private IaaS in a box that lends itself to it’s public cloud offering. Their OpenStack cloud seems rushed in that they don’t have a complementary private cloud solution for their traditional enterprise customer that they already know well today.

By: Barb Darrow

Barb Darrow — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 21:29:06 +0000

HP is not alone in cloud woes no. More stories to follow. thanks.

By: E3Cgroup

E3Cgroup — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:35:13 +0000

Barb. You should check sec.gov every so often. HP isn’t the only one with ‘issues’ developing Cloud business.Cisco’s losses on its VCE investment continue to grow. 2010-$3m, 2011-$76m, 2012-$160m. Their cumulative losses on the VCE investment are now Cisco = $239m @ July 28th 2012 and EMC = $368.3m @ June 30. In July EMC funded VCE an additional $111m

By: Barb Darrow

Barb Darrow — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:40:53 +0000

@dan i would think so but there’s talk that they might sell ES (EDS) Off…sounds to me like anything and everything is on the table.

By: Dan Belcher

Dan Belcher — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 03:30:56 +0000

Shouldn’t ES/EDS be a huge asset here? They could focus on ES as the first and best customer for an enterprise-grade cloud offering–where cloud economics and agility should help them win and extend margins. Then they could use the volume from ES to get the type of scale that we see with the other cloud providers and finally double down on a broader offering? As I understand it, this would be similar to the AWS formula (where Amazon.com was customer #1) and even closer to IBM’s current strategy (of course the jury is still out there as well).

By: Giri Fox

Giri Fox — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 23:26:51 +0000

If talking about MS Azure, be sure to differentiate whether you mean it’s new IaaS offering or not. Its IaaS variant might be attractive to the same Windows-bias target market that HP will orient to naturally.

By: Rasto Ha

Rasto Ha — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:56:08 +0000

Hello Mikel,
as Shameer Mulji wrote, I would also like to get more info about, why the “lame MS Azure”, cause I have the same feeling, MS might be doing it right, so just curious, if you have some more specific information/experience. Thanks.

By: Shameer Mulji

Shameer Mulji — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:31:31 +0000

Hi Mikel,

In a previous post, you called Microsoft’s Azure effort lame. I was curious to know why that was. They seem to be putting a serious effort behind going all cloud.

By: Mikel Kirk

Mikel Kirk — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 05:27:09 +0000

I neglected to answer the question, sorry. Of course HP is unhappy with the level of interest. There isn’t a level of interest that would make them happy except “all of it”. In the cloud VM space they’re competing against entrenched VM hosts, so every new customer is a win. They know they’re not going to defeat Amazon’s compute cloud on the first day, nor even Microsoft’s lame Azure. It’s a new service for them and they’re ecstatic to get every new customer. HP is going to service every new customer far beyond even what they want until they reach some indefinite level of market penetration where they can back off the service to some more reasonable profitable level. As a beta tester the response time was scary fast: they hunted me down by email, phone, fax, text, chat, whatever it took to get the ticket closed in the shortest time, and tier 3 (developer engineer) support was the default, easily escalated to tier 4: direct interaction with the engineer responsible for the function. For now for HP it’s all about the customer wins, whatever the cost, and they are winning customers.

How they’ll do when this is a milk run is an entirely different question, but for now HP is putting their best foot forward.

I haven’t quite put it this way here before so: I recommend HP Cloud, here in my right name. For now.

/I still don’t work for them. I do sometimes sell HP stuff amongst a vast catalog of other things. My opinion is my own, and nobody paid me to say this.

By: Mikel Kirk

Mikel Kirk — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 04:37:20 +0000

If you try and make sense of HP reorgs you’re just going to go crazy. There is no sense to this one, and there was no sense to any of the others. They know they need to reorg, but don’t know to what. So they fire random people, make a mess, and try to congeal the remainder and move forward. When that doesn’t work, they do it again.

In my spot in an ISV i’ve seen one friend go leave us to go to HP and achieve great heights, and another go there and do less well. HP steals our people all the time. In my opinion it was the one less capable who achieved great heights in the HP org, because he was persuasive and had better people skills, rather than the one more grounded in technology and skilled in the art. That tells me all I need to know about where HP is headed.