HP Kills Helion Public Cloud, Focuses on Hybrid, Private Cloud

Hewlett Packard (HPQ) is shutting down its Helion Public Cloud offering as of January 31, 2016 to focus on its private and managed cloud capabilities.

The decision to retire HP Helion Public Cloud was announced yesterday in a blog post, where the company explained its renewed focus on meeting rapidly increasing customer demand for private cloud and hybrid offerings.

Helion Public Cloud will no longer accept new customer accounts as of October 21.

“Today, our customers are consistently telling us that in order to meet their full spectrum of needs, they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud, as well as access to SaaS applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads,” said Bill Hilf, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud, in the blog post. “In addition, they are pushing for delivery of these solutions faster than ever before.”

Going forward, HP will invest in its HP Helion OpenStack platform and place more resources into the expansion of its managed and Virtual Private Cloud offerings, according to the announcement.

To accommodate its existing public cloud customers, HP said it will move to a multiple partner-based model for public cloud capabilities, and will help customers build and run customized cloud environments suited to their individual needs. Efforts will include an expanded partner ecosystem and the integration of different public cloud environments, as well as the ability for customers to build cloud-portable applications based on Helion OpenStack and the HP Helion Development Platform.

Additional support for Amazon Web Services with HP Helion Eucalyptus and support for Microsoft Office 365 and Azure have also been added. Finally, platform- as-a-service customers can now run the Cloud Foundry platform wherever they want, including their own private clouds or in AWS or Azure.

“All of these are key elements in helping our customers transform into a hybrid, multi-cloud IT world,” said Hilf. “We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies.”