HP’s decision to shut down its Helion Public Cloud offering left the industry speculating about the company’s direction. If cloud is the future, was this a backward step to irrelevance?

Bill Hilf, senior VP and GM for HP Cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), said that that reasoning couldn’t be farther from the truth. He told John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during HPE Discover 2015 in London that HPE’s decision is both progressive and advantageous for the company and its customers.

“Literally not a single customer I talk to says, ‘I’m moving everything to one type of cloud, public or private,'” Hilf said. The company began to see much greater opportunity through partnering with public cloud providers rather than confining customers to only the HP Helion cloud.  “The moment we did that, it opened up like literally a dam” of opportunities to work with diverse customers, Hilf explained.

Cloud to be everyone’s utility

Hilf predicted that there will be long tail distribution of cloud eventually. “I fundamentally believe cloud computing will be like the web,” he said. “It will be everyone’s utility.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2015 — London. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting live with theCUBE hosts during the event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE