E.g., go to IBM's cloud site (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cloud/index.html) and behold the content free page w/ generic stock photos. Click on the pricing page on the getting started page and it tells you "This page is no longer available".
With AWS by contrast the "Sign Up Now" button is prominently displayed on the home page and in mere minutes you can have your test server up and running for which you pay nothing for a year!
IBM and HP can't get out of the mindset of selling expensive hardware w/ even more expensive support and consulting contracts. Until they do, they are doomed in the cloud space.
Also the mindset of playing the "Ask a salesperson for a quote" which is code for "We have no fixed pricing, it will cost whatever you can afford to pay because our business is a resource extraction operation and we will strip-mine your budget."
This isn't exactly a dupe, but if you change "HP will build a cloud" into "HP will ship WebOS on every PC next year," you will probably get the exact same discussion we had the last time Mr. Apotheker opened his mouth to brag about stuff he wasn't shipping:
> "HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn't have. When HP makes announcements, it will be getting ready to ship." - Leo Apotheker, Jan 27 2011
It's kind of wacky that he sites selling servers to most of the cloud hosts today as an indicator that it's a market HP ought to be in. Not paying resale margins on servers is an advantage, but not a reason. A reason may be.. say, you're Google or Amazon and you've had to build out the ability to quickly and deploy apps on the internet anyways. Is that something HP has any real mindshare or experience in?
That's a good point. Even if they think it's hype, their clients don't think it is and they will look bad if they don't join the bandwagon. Large companies have a harder time being opinionated.
My cynical take is that their clients do know it's hype, however if you're an executive who has bet on HP, this announcement means you can't be second-guessed. If somebody angling for your job asks "Why are we with HP? Why don't we go to the cloud?" you will respond smoothly, "We are going to the cloud with HP, in the fullness of time, after all the relevant details have been examined and the considerations carefully weighed, ..."
I think you're exactly right and I'd add the enterprise cloud is about giving large customers faster provisioning and more control over their costs. Enterprises will have a mix of cloud apps and apps on fixed assets. HP will just offer both options, so as to not make their customers have to choose between HP and "going cloud".
And neither did I, is this anything like the other cloud services people know off?
Also, if I was CEO the first thing I'd change is the damn website. That's probably why he hasn't heard of it, it's almost impossible to find anything on that site.
Latecomer? AWS is one of the oldest cloud hosting platforms out there and it's what, 6, 7 years old? The majority of the others are less than 5. This space is just heating up.
That's not to say that HP won't fail spectacularly here, but to suggest that it's too late for a company with billions of dollars to make a move in the space seems a bit rash.
This is really not a nascent market any more when you have some of the largest Internet companies using cloud services heavily, like Netflix.
The incumbents have huge scale advantages and accumulated experience. Also, they have a huge base of open source, freely available libraries out there to allow interaction with their cloud. (I feel like there is one for every AWS service in every commonly used programming language.)
These are huge advantages that HP will have tremendous trouble overcoming if it just comes out with a "me-too" cloud service a year from now.
If HP announced their cloud service TODAY, and you were choosing which company to put your web service with, would you really consider them over the existing services with a significant track record and third-party support?
For enterprise hosting, yes, I would. They are giants in the enterprise server industry, no reason for them not to be the same in the enterprise cloud industry (which has barely started to heat up).
I guess I just meant that it seems far too many companies are announcing "future plans". Building such a large product is certainly possible, but there are so many other companies far ahead of them (shipping, or nearly shipping) that they will have a lot of ground to cover in little time.
EDIT: After some more thought, it also seems like while the definition of what a cloud service is isn't solidified yet, but it's definitely something HP doesn't have any experience building, which is also a huge hindrance. Contrast that with Amazon, Salesforce, VMware, and others, and it seems like the gap is just enormous. Certainly not insurmountable, though.
> He announced the plan after laying out a strategy combining the cloud, connectivity and software that “enables and joins them together.” He portrayed it as a natural move for HP, which is a powerful player in the server business. “Today seven out of 10 cloud providers are already our customers,” he said.
... so of course we knew we had to compete with them!
Is anybody else bothered by the use of the term "cloud" when speaking about hosted services? These services don't live "on the cloud" - they just reside on someone else's remote server, really no different than if you had a remote data center yourself. For something to really live "on the cloud" it literally needs to reside on the network, not stored on a server somewhere but constantly moving/shifting/replicating out in the aether of connections that is the Internet with the ability to pull up the service through a local terminal on demand (think Skynet).
When I see the picture of a suit-and-tie type next to something about joining the latest tech gravy train, I can't help but smell the burning platform.
E.g., go to IBM's cloud site (http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cloud/index.html) and behold the content free page w/ generic stock photos. Click on the pricing page on the getting started page and it tells you "This page is no longer available".
With AWS by contrast the "Sign Up Now" button is prominently displayed on the home page and in mere minutes you can have your test server up and running for which you pay nothing for a year!
IBM and HP can't get out of the mindset of selling expensive hardware w/ even more expensive support and consulting contracts. Until they do, they are doomed in the cloud space.