HP’s Helion Cloud Announcement – My Take

HP made an announcement today – 05/7/14 on their new Cloud Platform, HP Helion Cloud. Helion is built on OpenStack and with the announcement comes a $1B dollar comment on the part of HP. If I’m in the OpenStack community I’m certainly feeling that the platform took a huge step forward today as the virtualization platform of choice. The OpenStack community now includes HP, AT&T, RackSpace, IBM, RedHat and many others.

Although I don’t see an immediate impact on the VMWare community, I do think it will overtime. VMWare and the service providers who have built their cloud platform on VMWare are going to be under increasing pressure to become more price sensitive. VMWare in particular is going to need to become more flexible with their license fees.

HP also noted how large their data center footprint is today – 80 Data Centers, in 27 countries. Over the next 18 months, HP will be deploying the Helion in 20 centers around the world. What’s interesting is this footprint clearly places HP on par with some of the largest providers in the industry. Who knew!

The Cloud concept is really driving how technology is owned and operated. HP’s commitment is just further reinforcement that this is not a fad, but a true technology shift that is taking place. Who will win, HP, Google, AWS, CenturyLink/Savvis, IBM, or a yet unknown.

The challenges for our clients.

If you are an investor, and a Cloud Provider is in your sights, you really need to think about where the puck is going not where it is today. Most of the established service providers have chosen VMWare as their virtualization stack of choice. As noted above, a good decision for the “now” but we need to see how VMWare responds.

If you are a looking for a service provider and a VMWare shop, you may want to make sure your service provider has capabilities beyond just VMWare. There are a number of cloud providers that are building a vendor neutral model, that could be a solid choice for the now and in the future.

The bottom line.

We certainly live in an interesting time. There is a major shift taking place and anyone that is involved with technology is living it on a daily basis.

-TC