Open Stack

>From today's news.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/11/30/hpe-dumps-openstack-cloud-foundry-assets-onto-suse/

In what would appear to be a reversal of a commitment made last July
to maintain a presence in the OpenStack market, amid the sale of its
software division to Micro Focus, its SUSE division announced
Wednesday that HPE has agreed to hand over its interest in both the
OpenStack hybrid cloud platform and Cloud Foundry cloud-native apps
platform.

SUSE’s announcement describes the transaction as a unilateral deal,
topped off by HPE’s decision to name SUSE its preferred open source
partner for Cloud Foundry and OpenStack, as well as Linux.

“We have had a very long and successful partnership with HPE around
Linux, with many examples of successful technical and business
collaboration,” stated Michael Miller, SUSE’s President of Strategy,
Alliances and Marketing, in a note to Data Center Knowledge.  “With
this agreement, we will expand on that foundation and formalize that
relationship.  HPE has named SUSE as their preferred partner for Linux
and as such we will work together to ensure that SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server is the best Linux option for HPE customers.”

Miller told Data Center Knowledge that SUSE plans to hire “a
significant number of HPE engineers with experience in OpenStack IaaS,
Cloud Foundry PaaS, containers, and Kubernetes,” though he declined to
specify numbers.  He left the door open for SUSE to hire some HPE
personnel who the company declared last October that it would be
laying off.

“The acquired OpenStack assets will be integrated into SUSE OpenStack
Cloud,” reads SUSE’s statement, “and the acquired Cloud Foundry and
PaaS assets will enable SUSE to bring to market a certified,
enterprise-ready SUSE Cloud Foundry PaaS solution for all customers
and partners in the SUSE ecosystem.”

As part of the deal to sell HPE’s Software division, which was valued
at the time at $8.8 billion, HPE shareholders would collectively
become the 50.1 percent owner of independently traded Micro Focus,
SUSE’s parent company since last year.  That deal remains scheduled to
be fully consummated in Q3 2017.  Miller said that deal was made
independently of today’s deal with SUSE.

In a statement Wednesday morning to Data Center Knowledge, HPE
officially acknowledged the deal.

“HPE will OEM SUSE OpenStack Cloud and the SUSE Cloud Foundry-based
PaaS solution as the foundation of the continued delivery of Helion
OpenStack and Helion Stackato solutions with HPE support and
professional services,” the statement reads.  “By partnering with
SUSE, HPE will provide best-in-class OpenStack and Cloud Foundry-based
PaaS solutions that are simple to deploy into customer’s multi-cloud
environments.”

Hewlett-Packard Corp. entered the OpenStack space in May 2014,
pledging over $1 billion of investment into the development of the
open source software infrastructure platform.  At that time, CEO Meg
Whitman declared OpenStack “the very fabric of your enterprise,”
integrating into one package “all the benefits and agility of cloud
computing, all the possibilities and innovation of open source, and
all the security and reliability that enterprises need.”

The company would produce a platform that would make it as easy to
deploy workloads in its own Helion public cloud as on its own hybrid,
on-premises platform, both of which would be based on OpenStack.  It
placed Bill Hilf in charge of implementing the Helion strategy, as its
vice president for cloud products.

“We understand what our customers need with OpenStack,” stated Hilf in
accepting the assignment just over two years ago.  “We want it to be
easy to install and easy to update and manage, and they need it to
have a robust set of enterprise capabilities wrapped around the
operating system, while staying true to the kernel and interfaces of
the platform itself.”

At that time, Hewlett-Packard (HPE’s predecessor company) had an
existing, non-exclusive alliance with Red Hat.  To this day, both
companies continue to publish promotional materials touting the
benefits of that alliance to customers.

Yet the company’s corporate strategy has made countless unanticipated
deviations, the split — which formed HPE and the consumer-focused HP
Inc. — being just one of them.  That move came just months after CEO
Whitman quelled speculation about a split by invoking the phrase, “One
HP,” as a symbol of corporate unity.  Sensing the writing on the wall,
Hilf left HPE last August, and is now CEO of Vulcan, Inc., the
investment and philanthropy firm led by Microsoft co-founder Paul
Allen.

Today the company’s focus appears to have shifted back in the
direction of Microsoft and Windows-based platforms.  Tuesday morning
at HPE’s Discover London conference, the company invited Microsoft XVP
Scott Guthrie on stage to discuss HPE’s current hybrid cloud project,
being produced jointly with Microsoft around the Windows-based Azure
Stack.