HP Comes to Terms With the Cloud - NYTimes.com

A less cloudy future for HP

"HP thought it would compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for business rentals of computing power via so-called public cloud assets. Companies like Netflix, Snapchat and 3M now run significant parts of their businesses in such clouds, and the field is growing rapidly.

After looking at the market, however, HP is now ceding the public cloud.

“We thought people would rent or buy computing from us,” said Bill Hilf, the head of HP’s cloud business. “It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.”

HP is still selling servers, but increasingly it looks like its biggest customers will be cloud companies themselves, or other computing behemoths, like Facebook. For thousands of other customers, Ms. Whitman hopes to build smaller cloud systems, while figuring out ways these companies can also use Amazon or Microsoft."

HP Comes to Terms With the Cloud - NYTimes.com