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

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."

Comments

More accurate ...

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:More accurate ...

[gstoddart]

Well, "which HP?" is a good question.

As Hewlett-Packard (HPQ - Get Report) prepares to break apart its enterprise unit from its division that produces personal computers and printers, the tech institution said Wednesday that it will sell cyber security unit Tipping Point to Tokyo-based Trend Micro International for $300 million.

Splitting up and selling off are not exactly indicators everything is going swimmingly.

As I said, companies grow, companies buy, companies fuck up what they buy, and then realize they no longer have much of an idea what they are anymore.

I think the M+A craze in tech for the last 20 years has been a lot of short term profit seeking, but is overall really bad in the long run. It maximizes executive compensation, but it doesn't actually achieve the outcomes they claim it does.

Re:More accurate ...

[Anonymous Coward]

HP is an ink company.

Re:More accurate ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:HP = Printers

[Marginal Coward]

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...

They used HP hardware to build their cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

They used HP hardware to build their own cloud because it was cheaper.

Then they found out they needed to buy separate ILOM cards so they could manage their hardware. So much for cheaper.

They spent hundreds of man-hours installing the ILOM cards.

Then they found out they needed to by licenses for the ILOM software. Oh crap, now it's more expensive.

Then the servers went operational and they found out their brand-fucking-new HP servers are actually SLOWER than the years-old Sun Microsystems-built x86 servers they're supposed to replace - because HP used cheap parts like motherboards with no memory bandwidth and complete piece-of-shit commodity disk controllers that shit the bed when trying to move more than 50MB/sec. Oh yeah, the NEW HP servers only have two gigE ports - whereas the OLD Sun servers had FOUR. And if they had used new Oracle-built servers from the old Sun production line, they would have gotten four 10GB network ports on FASTER servers - and had remote management hardware with fully licensed software for LESS money. (And Oracle ain't exactly cheap, so when the final solution from HP is shittier and more expensive than the one from Oracle...)

Then the damn HP hardware started failing right and left. And the cheap-ass fiber-channel HBAs don't work with a damn.

Can you tell I've dealt with HP before?

So it's not surprising the HP can't deal with HP either.

MBAs + H1Bs = HP

[zerofoo]

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.

Re:MBAs + H1Bs = HP

[ErichTheRed]

"You can't simply crank out an MBA and put that person in charge of a bunch of cheap programmers and expect innovation."

This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades. Having worked in big corporations almost exclusively, I've seen a lot of this:
- Management by spreadsheet, exclusively. (If you can't measure it you can't manage it.)
- MBAs being put in charge of divisions they know nothing about. (A good manager can manage anything.)
- CxOs listening to McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Accenture, Gartner, etc. exclusively. (They're the most expensive so they give the best advice.)

The last one is particularly funny -- I've experienced a lot of white-shoe consulting firm employees coming in and telling veteran execs 20 years their senior what to do. All of these firms' business models are to take newly minted MBAs, fly them to client sites and dazzle executives with sales PowerPoints. As you can imagine, the problem continues until the consulting firm can't extract any more fees for those former students.

Re:MBAs + H1Bs = HP

[gstoddart]

This. It boggles my mind that no one has stood up and said "this is stupid" over the last decades.

Well, they're in a feedback loop now .. the MBAs are the ones saying you need to bring in MBAs.

Much like how CEO pay climbed to stupid levels because CEOs and their cronies sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs, when the sit on multiple boards and decide how much to pay CEOs.

The people making the bad decisions are hiring people just like them to help make the decisions, because thay mostly want like-minded people. Their compensation is separated from their performance, and they only look at the next quarter so they can take their bonuses and run like hell.

Corporations are almost incapable of long-term planning, because they really only give a damn about the next 3-4 months, and ensuring they maximize their own compensation.

My personal opinion, like you having seem it for the last bunch of years, is that C-level management and MBAs are pretty much uniformly fucking up corporations by doing the same stupid stuff over and over again. But by the time anybody realizes these clowns have been promoted, or received their golden parachute.

Other than CEOs, who really believes CEOs are worth anywhere near what they get paid? Oh, of course, the people who aspire to be CEOs so they too can get overpaid.

It's the emperor's new clothes. It's lies and stupidity piled on top of one another.

Smart

[willworkforbeer]

At this late stage, trying to catch up to AWS or Azure would be a death march. They should try something with better odds, say, invading Russia during the winter.