HP exec Bill Hilf backtracks on his statement that “it makes no sense” to compete in public cloud, reaffirms commitment to OpenStack-powered Helion
Context & Ripple Effects
Four days after HP signaled it was backing out of public cloud, citing competition and unprofitability, executive Bill Hilf publicly reversed course and reaffirmed the company's commitment to its OpenStack-powered Helion service. The whiplash lands on a business already unsettled: February's reorg had seen Marten Mickos cede key responsibilities over the cloud unit.
Hilf's statement reads as damage control over messaging rather than a change of strategy — which matters because HP's own later actions settled the question, when it moved to shut the Helion public cloud down on January 31, 2016.
First-order effects
- Helion customers and partners now have contradictory signals from HP within one week — a stated retreat from public cloud followed by an executive denial — making renewal decisions harder to price.
- The reaffirmation keeps OpenStack-powered Helion commitments nominally intact, but it comes from a unit whose leadership authority was already diluted when Mickos gave up key responsibilities.
Second-order effects
- OpenStack ecosystem vendors lose confidence in their most prominent enterprise champion when its commitment wobbles this visibly, weakening the platform's pitch against the big public clouds.
- Rivals can go after wavering Helion accounts, since HP itself has told the market the business lacks profitability — effectively advertising that its cloud is negotiable.
Third-order effects
- The backtrack bought time, not direction: HP's subsequent decision to close Helion confirmed the original assessment that hyperscale public cloud was unwinnable for the company.
- The endpoint of this arc shows up in HPE's later numbers and strategy — declining Hybrid IT revenue alongside Antonio Neri's push to transform all products into as-a-service offerings — the structural result of abandoning commodity public IaaS.
The trend: Large enterprise-IT vendors repeatedly tried to match hyperscale public-cloud economics, failed, and folded those ambitions into hybrid infrastructure and as-a-service models instead.