HP Buys Cloud Provider, Gets Marten Mickos To Head Its Cloud Division

jfruh writes: In 2010, HP tried to buy its way into the analytics game by shelling out billions for Autonomy, a deal that was a famous disaster. But that isn't stopping the company from making big buys: it will be buying Eucalyptus, a cloud provider headed by ex-MySQL AB CEO Marten Mickos, and bringing Mickos in to head the new HP Cloud division.

LOL ...

[gstoddart]

Maybe he can show HP how to do URLs instead of the gibberish ones they've been using for years.

Because I get the distinct impression that the URLs like "http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/psi/swdHome?sp4ts.oid=3988164&ac.admitted=1410546638124.876444892.492883150" are caused by HP not really knowing how to do it.

Seriously, what the heck is h20565.www2????

Either this is a technology failure, or HP has been trying very hard to ensure that nobody could possibly find their documentation.

Re:LOL ...

[i kan reed]

If I had to guess, it's a sign of outdated software, and a bureaucratically enforced software standardization.

h20565 being a server host's identity, www2 being a subnet for their "second generation" website makeover done sometime in the 90s or early 2000s, and the stuff at the end being some sort of session tracking based navigational nightmare.

Re:

[Bacon Bits]

Either this is a technology failure, or HP has been trying very hard to ensure that nobody could possibly find their documentation.

Well, HP is a Fortune 500 company, so it's probably both.

Why fail merely through incompetence or ineptness when you can do both? You can legitimately classify every minor bug as WONTFIX - As Designed, and every major bug can be fixed as a design error in the next version of your hardware that costs 10% more. Obsolescence through incompetence is the major business model of the modern world.

Re:

[sillybilly]

Fuck the cloud. Fuck the cloud. Fuck the cloud.
Just like forced insurance, dog licenses, or Monsanto and their biotech crap, I'll fight the cloud with everything I got, if I get to live.

Re:

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

I'll bet they both run the same CMS...just with some per-company tweaks. Even though I work at HP, I have no idea what kind of CMS our support site is running...if there even is a "single product" at all!

Re:

[mattack2]

Maybe he can show HP how to do URLs instead of the gibberish ones they've been using for years.

To be devil's advocate, are URLs "intended" to be human readable? I think there are arguments on both sides.

Doesn't it seem kind of silly, even though I admit they are more memorable, that every new movie that comes out has a new 'memorable' web site URL that's only relevant for a few months at most, rather than something like http://moviestudio.com/MOVIETI... [moviestudio.com]

Re:LOL ...

[martenmickos]

Thanks for the suggestion. That’s funny! I will do my best on all fronts at HP.

Re:

[gstoddart]

Thanks for the suggestion. That's funny! I will do my best on all fronts at HP.

LOL, only only Slashdot.

If you can fix that one thing, you will have been a stunning success, for all else that it encompasses. ;-)

Cheers (and good luck!)

Re:

[Jeeeb]

I'll have you know the website implementation process was par excellence for corporate software*.

Based on agile principles, the project was overseen by the VP for production, with advice coming from no less than two management consultancies. Actual day-to-day management was of course delegated to a team of internal PM's, carefully interfacing with the external consultancy PM's.

Stakeholder needs were carefully documented by a team of externaly contracted business analysts prior to commencement. Based on the

Re:

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

HPSC is Hewlett Packard Support Center. The URL is "gibberish" because it's an auto-generated page. We don't write static pages for products anymore...most companies haven't for years. Thus the "template" in there...our system pulls various info from all over (drivers, manuals, etc) and presents these pages. finding documentation is easy, there's a "Search" on almost every page. Sorry that it's not in a human-comprehensible URL format...

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

you sound like you work there - in which case, you should already know that the only thing more useless than the external website search on HP's site, is the internal version of the same search engine.

Good!

[twmcneil]

At least if he's working for HP he won't be able to do any real harm to anyone any longer.

nice

[Charliemopps]

Since HP is apparently paying every tech news site include Slashdot not to mention their recent court ruling, I'll just leave this here:

"Hewlett-Packard and three subsidiaries pleaded guilty Thursday to paying bribes to foreign officials in Russia, Mexico and Poland and agreed to pay $108 million in criminal and regulatory penalties. For over 10 years Hewlett-Packard kept 2 sets of books to track slush-funds they used to bribe government officials for favorable contracts."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]

Re:

[gstoddart]

Since HP is apparently paying every tech news site include Slashdot not to mention their recent court ruling, I'll just leave this here:

Dude, what are you talking about?

It was on the frigging front page [slashdot.org] this morning, ZDNet [zdnet.com], and a bunch of other places have covered it.

If you're gonna claim some kind of conspiracy theory, at least go with one that's plausible.

What's the angle?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I can understand the interest in the existence of Eucalyptus itself (it's a more or less interface compatible implementation of a bunch of Amazon's heavily used 'cloud' services that you can run stuff on in house or at a non-Amazon 3rd party). Amazon's pricing is crazy aggressive; but sometimes you need to do things in house, want to do things in house, or want to go mixed-strategy(in-house/Amazon for overflow, spread across more than one 3rd party provider, etc, etc.) and in general it's not a good feeling

Re:

[symbolset]

HP will find a way to make it compatible with IE 7 and below on Windows 7 32 bit, run-as Administrator, and absolutely nothing else.

Re:

[jbolden]

Lots of companies and applications make use of the Amazon API. So that one I see in the wild a lot. OpenStack is implementing a compatibility layer for that reason. I'd assume the reason for an HP cloud is to allow IT department that have heavily outsourced to HP to pull Amazon based cloud applications back into the main administration. I.E. a war against rogue IT.

Re:

[martenmickos]

Great question. We are seeing a lot of interest among enterprises to have AWS-like functionality in their own datacenters. And we also know that they are eager to use OpenStack. So at Eucalyptus we decided to do something about it. Here is my blog about the topic: https://www.eucalyptus.com/blog/2014/08/11/why-eucalyptus-keynoting-openstack-conference

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes sense because HP has been working on one product, an orchestrator utility that can take a catalog of VM architectures (Hyper-V, OpenStack, ESXi) for private clouds, as well as public clouds (AWS, Azure), and have their software abstract that to the user. Open a VM, and the software pretty much does the rest.

With the ability to move a VM across architectures similar to a "meta" vMotion, it makes life interesting, be it moving a dev machine from a cluster to another one for archiving (perhaps a VM c

Re: What's the angle?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once an hp employee. Their death came with that mba guy. It is just painfully slow, because they have so much money. No chance in hell to compete with google. Hp already hated real engineers in the late 90s.

Re:

[haruchai]

It's been a long time since I've heard someone other than Carly blamed for the demise of HP.

Re:

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

Too bad it put this at 0 as an AC...good info there. I actually work at HP, in the Enterprise Services. It's almost mind-boggling how many VM's we run...for a single client, on a single blade rack, there is over 1,200 VMs running. Redhat, MS, Oracle's UVS, whatever might else be out there...I'd bet that in any single data center there's probably 100,000+ VM's running.

We use f5 load balancers, auto-starting ESX clusters...if a VM goes down it just moves over to a backup VM and alerts us; most times our

Re:

[BarbaraHudson]

The low comment total has nothing to do with beta (though beta is a good reason to log in, since logged-in users can avoid it). Simply put, nobody really gives a damn about the cloud-de-jour any more. "Cloud" is no longer a hot buzz word - it's a buzz-kill, even among geeks and nerds.

Re:

[CaptainDork]

Google has an article, About 11,400,000 results (0.36 seconds), on "capitalism."

Obligatory Link

[Sport89]

http://youtu.be/9ntPxdWAWq8 [youtu.be]

a blip on the way to slow death

[supernova87a]

HP is a drowning man, desperately grasping for any lead, imaginary or not, that might save them. The leadership bankrupted and hollowed out a solid line of printer products and other devices, in order to prop up stupid, non-distinctive hardware whose design was phoned in to imagine grabbing some market share with no other purpose. Their PCs, laptops, tablets are a joke. The major purchaser of their equipment are corporations who buy because they extract big discounts from a struggling company with litt

Re:

[Vanders]

Your post would carry more weight if HP hadn't already been in public cloud [hpcloud.com] for nearly three years now, and weren't the largest single contributor to OpenStack. Buying Eucalyptus isn't some desperate attempt to get into the cloud market; it's a smart move to consolidate their existing position.

Don't let facts get in the way of giving HP a good kicking though. This is Slashdot, after all.