Hewlett-Packard Co. has raised a few eyebrows by publicly admitting that it has no chance of competing in the public cloud infrastructure market against the likes of Amazon Web Services, and is “ceding the public cloud”, according to Quentin Hardy in the New York Times.

“We thought people would rent or buy computing from us. It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head [with Amazon],” said Bill Hilf, senior vice president of Helion product management at HP, in Hardy’s article.

The admission probably won’t come as a surprise to many. HP has long struggled to make any kind of mark on the cloud, and its current OpenStack-based offering Helion is “widely regarded as being little more than shelfware – actual customer usage is low to non-existent,” according to Ben Kepes in Forbes.

Nevertheless, HP is still keen to muddy the waters somewhat. Despite Hilf’s comments, the company stated in an email to VentureBeat that it “is not leaving the public cloud market. We run the largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud out there. This has to do with not competing head-to-head with the big public cloud players.”

In other words, HP won’t be throwing in the towel just yet, but it does appear to have admitted it will only ever be an also-ran compared to AWS, Google and Microsoft. Or maybe it’s just trying to lower expectations should its plans never come to fruition? That’s probably just as well, for at best, HP might become the number one choice for those who prefer to adopt OpenStack clouds, rather than go all-in with the big boys.

There’s still a lot of potential in OpenStack after all, even if the recent shutdown of Nebula, a startup that sold data center hardware for deploying OpenStack, suggests that consolidation could be in the air. As Nebula itself noted, the biggest problem it faced was that the OpenStack market is still several years away from maturing. But “as a venture-backed startup, we did not have the resources to wait,” Nebula said in a statement. It’s a different story for HP of course, which is more than able to bide its time and wait for OpenStack adoption to increase.

But whether or not HP will be able to leverage its position as the “largest OpenStack technology-based public cloud” and ever become a meaningful player is doubtful. As Kepes notes in Forbes, HP’s track record in the field leaves a lot to be desired, and many believe the company made a serious error of judgment when it shunted aside ex Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, just months after acquiring his company.

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