Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

HP To Shut Down Its OpenStack Based Public Cloud (fortune.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the jettison-the-chaff dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Hewlett-Packard, which has been backing off on ambitious public cloud plans for a year, is now calling it quits, sunsetting HP Helion Public cloud in January 2016. in a buzzword-laden blog post, the company says its building out support for interoperability with Amazon and Microsoft public cloud offerings to provide options for customers who require such functionality. "HP’s decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company’s public cloud ambitions. It has become increasingly clear that there are three, maybe four companies that can support (at scale) the massive shared computing, networking, and storage infrastructure necessary for a public cloud. ... HP will continue pushing its private and hybrid cloud."

7 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. More accurate ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    HP's decision is the latest milestone in what has been a slow fade for the company

    HP has been in decline for years.

    Quality is down. Innovation is down. A series of seemingly incompetent CEOs. A couple of bad purchases. Some stupid decisions. Some utterly failed products.

    Like so many large companies, now they mostly just lurch from one thing to another hoping sooner or later one of them sticks. One gets the distinct impression nobody really has a clue of what they're doing, and even less of a clue about what to do about it.

    Welcome to the modern world of tech, where you buy everything in sight, fuck it up, have a bunch of bad management, and then eventually implode as you realize nobody in your organization measures up to the people who got you there.

    One wonders how many good companies have been swallowed up and ruined in trying to make huge companies more profitable, only to find out the huge companies have no idea what they're doing.

    Over and over again, we see big corporations who really just keep changing CEOs, and utterly failing to understand just how badly they're all screwing up the company.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:More accurate ... by The-Ixian · · Score: 1, Interesting

      It may be in decline but it is still one of the top computer and network equipment manufacturers in the world.

      I have also never worked at a large corporation that didn't have some involvement with HP whether it be servers or huge software platforms.

      I don't think HP is in any real trouble.

      --
      My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
    2. Re:More accurate ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Here is an anectdote, but a good example.

      Small-ish company, startup culture. Not the kind of startup culture where there is a ping pong table, the kind were we feel we're the underdog in taking away big corporate accounts for a niche product where the big players have basically shut down development for nearly a decade. Needless to say, we were estatic that we could walk in and basically offer a redo product, and that alone gave us advantages.

      Eventually we grew the company to a 40 million per year revenue generating company. Along comes Cisco, who wants to "buy their way into the server room" in the operations software side of things. Now the product is a tiny hard-to-find offering, and it basically still exists; but as an improved way to manage Cisco offered hardware. That's because Cisco doesn't know how to sell software, and so we were pushed to be a ticket rider to their hardware sales, or risk losing any means of selling what was a growing product.

      After a few years, the cuts came, and now there's basically a skeleton crew to maintain what was once the flagship offering. The product became so obscure that it even dropped off Gartner's map in comparison to other products in the industry. I'm sure it's making money, but at many sites I imagine it is shelf ware. You know, the stuff that was along for the ride, and you'll install it one day to try to figure out what it is. Then you'll decide it's pretty cool, but you really don't have enough time to learn it (and don't want to take the risk of depending on what you don't understand).

  2. Re:HP = Printers by Marginal+Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a brand, HP means nothing more to people anymore than "some company that makes printers."

    Speaking of HP as a brand, I'm sure many here remember when HP meant "the best test equipment money could buy" (except for oscilloscopes, of course.) That sort of reputation for a brand is rare indeed. However, after going into computers, making printers, merging with Compaq, etc., they spun off that business and renamed it "Agilent." Later, Agilent became "Keysight" after they split that into a test equipment business and a medical equipment business, the latter of which retained the Keysight name. But whatever they're calling their test equipment business now, I think they've lost significant brand value, regardless of the value of the products that Keysight actually makes.

    Evidently, they thought the "HP" brand in computers - or more likely printers - was so strong that they would retain that for those products at the cost of losing the top brand in the test equipment business - which, of course, is the business that Messrs. Hewlett and Packard originally created.

    Today, the PC business is a commodity business that nobody wants to be in anymore for that very reason. I suspect the printer business eventually will be a commodity business, if it isn't already. Of course, brands don't much matter in commodity businesses.

    Sayonara, "HP," my old pal - you were a good brand while you lasted...

  3. MBAs + H1Bs = HP by zerofoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    HP will be the poster child for what happens when MBAs and H1Bs take over a company.

    Ultimately, tech companies need to be run by tech visionaries. Car companies need to be run by car guys/gals. Financial companies need to be run by sharks.

    You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation. Creativity and passion can not be taught.

    I miss the old HP, run by passionate engineers, that built the worlds best calculators, printers, and oscilloscopes.

  4. It's not HP... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I work for a fairly large service provider, we've been trying to be successful at deploying a full public cloud based on OpenStack for a long time now (years). Today, OpenStack is put together by a fairly large amount of private cloud folks. It's a very nice offering if you want to run a private cloud -- even a very large one, but running a public cloud is different. You have to think about multi-tenancy -- scaling in the number of different segregated users using the cloud not just the number of nodes in the system, you have to think about no down time deployments and migrations, etc. OpenStack is just not focused on this -- and there have been a lot of design decisions that make running a public cloud a pain. We've tried multiple times to submit patches that would enable public -- but there is a lot of bureaucracy and control by private cloud companies that most of those patches fail to make master. Thanks to DefCore [https://github.com/openstack/defcore/blob/master/doc/source/process/CoreDefinition.rst] if we introduce our own patches that fork core in any way -- even for our own deployments -- we risk losing the OpenStack trade mark. So it's very difficult, we haven't given up on OpenStack public cloud..yet...but it's frustrating.

  5. Re:They used HP hardware to build their cloud by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I used to work for HP and you are not far off. The cost center accounting meant that group A had to pay Group B for the product. Mind you it was only on paper but still there was a markup at each step.

    Ill also point out that there data-center services are crap. I pointed out that I could automate a lot of simple tasks that would reduce down time and provide the customer better service. The Director asked if it would reduce ticket counts as each of these items generated tickets. I said "Yes, it should cut the tickets in half, reduce maintenance times, increase up times, and make for a much more manageable service."

    I was directly ordered to NOT do it, Told to never bring it up again, and that if I ever let the customer know I would be fired. Seems they are paid by the ticket. So anything that would reduce the number of tickets is a bad thing, even when it is in the customers best interest.

    I was also told to tweak monitoring and make it more sensitive. That way it would create more tickets and more cash flow.

    Thats what you get for outsourcing to a data-center, they are not looking to provide your company with great services. They are looking to make more money from you.