An IT Mercy Kill…HP Retires the Helion Public Cloud

Date posted: 22nd October 2015

Amazon Web Services vs HP Helion Public cloud…game over…

HP announced today that it will retire their public cloud platform known as Helion as of January, 2016. After a year of going back and forth on the decision to end-of-life their cloud platform HP has finally admitted they lost in the public cloud war to larger competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. HP is giving customers until January 31, 2016 to migrate their data and applications to another platform.

SVP and GM of HP’s cloud division Bill Hilf quoted “Customer[s] tell us that they want the ability to bring together multiple cloud environments under a flexible and enterprise-grade hybrid cloud model”

He continued “Therefore, we will sunset our HP Helion Public Cloud offering on January 31, 2016. As we have before, we will help our customers design, build and run the best cloud environments suited to their needs – based on their workloads and their business and industry requirements.”

Today’s announcement was not entirely unexpected, this past April Mr. Hilf announced that they were planning to retire the service and the public cloud “made no sense” for the company with the service essentially being on death row since then. After going back on this statement last spring, HP left customers skeptically of the future and reduced trust in maintaining data within the Helion offering furthering the decline of the service.

As part of this announcement HP is planning to increase support of their private, hybrid and managed cloud services maintaining their strong capabilities in building private clouds for large enterprise customers. For the rest of the world Amazon Web Services has won the war maintaining significant market lead in the small and mid-sized business market along with a dominant lead in the world of startup businesses.

Amazon Web Services’ recent re:Invent conference was the drop the microphone moment for the public cloud industry and may have accelerated the timing of HP’s announcement today. Amazon leads the public cloud in enterprise class security, ease of migration, internet of things support, new partnerships and of course economies of scale.

HP’s full statement is available here
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