Correction:  HP is only sunsetting the Public Cloud ONLY not the Helion cloud platform.

Hewlett Packard Co. has put an end to the confusion surrounding the future of its HP Helion Public Cloud platform. There isn’t going to be any future, because HP has decided it’s going to shut the platform down on January 31, 2016.

Although company executives described HP Helion as a public cloud play, the platform was built to take on the massive $7 billion public cloud infrastructure created by Amazon Web Services, but despite HP’s best efforts, it hasn’t even come close to crashing that particular party.

“As we have before, we will help our customers design, build and run the best cloud environments suited to their needs – based on their workloads and their business and industry requirements,” said HP Cloud exec Bill Hilf in an effort at putting a positive spin on the shutdown.

No one will deny that the opportunity in the public cloud is massive. Startups and large enterprises alike love the cloud because all they need to do is pay the fees and gain access to unlimited computing power to drive their IT infrastructures. AWS, Microsoft and Google have all seen significant success in the cloud, but companies like HP (which were too late to the cloud) have been left wanting because they’ve been unable to invest the billions of dollars necessary to achieve the massive scale needed to compete in what is essentially a low-margin business. As such, HP Helion has often come under fire for being “too small” and “unfocused”.

Speculation that Helion might be on its deathbed appeared last April, when HP’s Hilf admitted in an interview that the public cloud didn’t make sense for his company. Hilf later backtracked on that statement, insisting the OpenStack-based Helion was here to stay, but the doubts had already been sown, and now it seems that HP has finally woken up to the reality that it simply can’t compete.

So what now for HP’s cloud efforts? Well, Hilf says the company is going to stick to doing what it does best – it’s going to help customers run their own private clouds with the hardware, software and services needed to built efficient clouds at scale. HP says it’s already working to ensure its data center cloud platform works seamlessly with AWS’ cloud, and no doubt it will try to ensure the same for Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine as well.

While most will agree the move is a sensible one from HP’s point of view, the company’s experience underscores how it’s become virtually impossible for anyone else to compete with the big boys in the public cloud.

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