Hewlett Packard sits on an amazing legacy of innovation, leadership and delivery. Hewlett Packard employs some great people, and continues to be highly relevant in the lucrative enterprise IT market.
And yet, the glitz and the noise around 'HP Helion' earlier this week is just depressing.
HP is going all-in on OpenStack, it says. That's a good thing, today. But they already were. They already had an OpenStack public cloud, and various other OpenStack bits and pieces. They also had some non-OpenStack (or differently OpenStack) offerings that were an unfortunate legacy of being a big company with competing priorities and overlapping product lines. So... HP Helion (they say, and I hope they mean it) tidies up an earlier mess and gets HP doing what everyone (including HP) already thought they should be doing. That's not really grounds for making a big and noisy announcement, is it?
"Our old stuff was disjointed in ways that were a bit silly. We're going to fix that."
Ooh. Quick, write a headline.
And, of course, no tech news story is complete without throwing a billion dollars at something. So HP is investing $1bn in Helion. Is that new money? Is that actually the money they were already spending in all their cloudy little silos? It's great that HP is putting people and money and weight behind making a go of an OpenStack-powered offering, but what does "a billion dollars" really mean... other than matching the billion IBM is spending on its cloudy stuff?
HP does not have a good track record when it comes to making sweeping public statements about cloud stuff. In fact, all it really does is dig a hole for itself. A hole it then hopes no one notices it clambering out of, as it makes the next big cloudy announcement. They keep doing this. More and more, it looks as though the good engineers, the sound managers and the credible execs are being pushed from one bold announcement to another, just to secure an ephemeral headline.
Please stop this, HP. Please get back to delivering sound, credible, safe, reliable products for your customers. They're mostly big enterprises. They want solid, dependable, robust, rock-solid, interoperable, affordable, and sustainable. Behind the scenes, that may be what your engineers have been delivering to them all along. But your public pronouncements on cloud, frankly, have been the exact opposite.
They'll start to notice, you know. They'll start to think you don't know what you're doing. They'll start to think you're fickle, and that you're simply following fashion or pursuing headlines. That might work in the consumer space, but it won't wash for long with your installed base.
