Dive Brief:

• HP announced it is discontinuing its public cloud offering, Computer Weekly reported.
• The company said it will focus instead on its private and hybrid product portfolio, where competition is not as fierce.
• The company said it will now help enterprises link their HP investments to other public cloud providers.

Dive Insight:

Six months ago, HP denied it was leaving the market, but the company has now changed course, saying it will discontinue its HP Helion Public Cloud offering on January 31, 2016.

The company will instead increase its efforts in the private and managed cloud market.

“We have made the decision to double-down on our private and managed cloud capabilities,” said Bill Hilf, senior vice-president and general manager of HP cloud. “For cloud-enabling software and systems, we will continue to innovate and invest in our HP Helion OpenStack platform. On the cloud services side, we will focus our resources on our managed and virtual cloud offerings.”

The firm previously indicated it would potentially give up trying to compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft in the public cloud.

According to Synergy Research Group, HP is the leader in selling the hardware that underpins private cloud environments.