

HP Announces Private Beta Program of HP Cloud Services - EwanToo
http://h30529.www3.hp.com/t5/HP-Scaling-the-Cloud-Blog/HP-Announces-Private-Beta-Program-of-HP-Cloud-Services/ba-p/115

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sjs382
This is the company that killed a hardware platform 2 months after it's
release. I dont think I'll be hitching my horse to this wagon.

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raganwald
I was going to post a similar comment, but after consideration, I think it’s
important to understand that different markets have different imperatives.

When selling to consumers or startups, you get one-off revenue from each sale.
Unless you are selling a locked-in phone plan or you are MSFT extracting a
legacy tax on upgrades, you can't take a high lifetime value per customer for
granted, you have to keep earning your revenues.

If something isn’t working, therefore, you can cut and run. You aren’t
throwing revenues away.

With enterprise products, OTOH, you lock them in for years, maybe decades.
Long after you stop making new versions, you are still selling support
contracts and charging for minor bug fix releases and ports. They are locked
in tight and can’t easily move to another vendor.

So you have a much bigger incentive to stay the course even if something isn’t
taking the world by storm: Those customers that do buy have a large lifetime
value.

I’m not saying I buy into whatever snake-oil Leo is selling this week, it’s
pretty obvious he has no credibility when it comes to announcements about what
HP will or won’t do, but I admit that walking away from a consumer product
doesn’t exactly mean that they’d do the same thing to a platform that might
sell to the Enterprise.

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dmethvin
Sure, HP dropping their tablet was like Microsoft dropping the Kin. That's not
the part of the story that scared corporate America. It's the simultaneous
news of HP telegraphing their exit from the PC market without any clear exit
strategy.

Clueless consumers may still shell out for HP PCs at Best Buy, but corporate
buyers will not touch them when their future is in doubt. That means the HP
sales person is not hanging around the office quite as often, and can't offer
killer bundles and deals that include hardware. Yes, IBM managed that
transition, but I don't see any indication HP can successfully implement the
same vision -- especially when competing against an established and organized
IBM.

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raganwald
+1 for noting that a vague exit from the PC business is entirely unlike
dropping the tablet. Weirdly, dropping the tablet might be dropping the “next
big thing” that might be the disruptive innovation to their own business, but
of course the Enterprise is not interested in disruptive innovation.

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sthlm
What they are offering with this solution is a service much more than a
product.

Some comments are projecting the potential success of this idea based on their
recent handling of hardware and software products. Services however are an
entirely different beast and how a company with roots in hardware products
will develop toward a services direction will be interesting to see.

I wouldn't discount this from the start. This is all about execution.

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FrancescoRizzi
surprised there is no comparative chart or analysis of their offering vs AWS,
Rackspace and the others.. does it make sense to launch without
showing/hinting as to how/why you are better than the established competition
('unless, of course, you aren't) ?

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EwanToo
Since it's based on openstack, I assume it'll be functionally very similar to
Rackspace.

The most promising thing about it is that if they have kept the Openstack APIs
available and stuck to the standard functionality, this should be the first of
many truly interchangeable public clouds.

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nikcub
So little real information

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raganwald
"HP will stop making announcements for stuff it doesn’t have”—Leo Apothekar,
January 2011

