Analysis
HP’s original intention with Helion was to offer a public cloud offering. By doing this, HP joined the ever growing masses joining the fight for market dominance in of the most highly sought after segment of the IT market – the public cloud.
This market is, and likely was, dominated by industry leaders in public cloud such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft, to name a few. HP potentially harkening back to the pre-cloud IT marketplace, to the previously stated HP view position that “if we are not the leader or a very close second, then we are not staying in this market.”
While Neuralytix (and others) speculates on the true impetus for HP to sunset the Helion offering on Jan 31, 2016 Neuralytix applauds this decision! HP should focus on its strengths as an IT product and services company with tremendous and powerful partnerships of all size and type.
By aligning with the cloud partners, specifically in this case, they can join forces and live the adage of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” A wise move in our opinion. The forward focus should be on enabling others such as AWS, et al. with product and services. Banning together will allow both HP and the public cloud providers to collectively fend off the mutual completion including but not limited to Oracle and IBM.
Traditional Infrastructure HP channel partners are thrilled with this move. They believe this is start of the new HP Enterprise (HPE), that was the result of the split that HP undertook on November 1, 2015, with its back to future look at HP. One partner expressed that this was “the smartest thing I have seen from HP in a while. They are coming back to the channel. It reminds me of the old HP.”
The overall sense the traditional infrastructure partners (such as Melillo, Nth Generation, SHI, CDW, Avnet) is a sigh of relief. Partners are independent businesses with their own goals and their own investors.
Neuralytix’s research and experience of working with partners for many years, channel partners ask for clarify from their partners, including vendor partners. In this highly competitive market they just need to know where others are in the market to decide who is friend, foe, partner, competitor. HP’s decision makes this very clear.
It is important to note that HP will remain in the private cloud, hoping to offer this platform to developers.
Again, Neuralytix thinks this is a brilliant move! The AppDev and DevOps communities are the launching pad of some of the next generation partners – the new entrants, borne of the Cloud.
Guidance
Competitors should take note! If HP is able to attract this new generation of partners to develop on HP, it is truly back to the future! This is way that the workstation of the past was dominated. It is the 2015 version of same move. Neuralytix believes HP’s next key move will be aligning the traditional partners with the new. Admittedly this will be a significant challenge as it like a generation gap but it can be done. Time will tell who will win this race, but this move sets up HP very nicely to gain significant traction.