Cloud consolidation continues
Consolidation in the cloud computing market continued this week with Hewlett Packard scooping up PaaS product Stackato.
HP is looking to stake a claim in a cloud market, but the company has been largely overshadowed by vendors such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. With the company soon splitting up, its enterprise division is continuing to invest in its Helion cloud offering, the latest evidence of which is its purchase of Stackato.
+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Deep dive on HP’s cloud delivery options, the importance of OpenStack and how it competes on price +
Stackato is a platform used to build new applications that has been developed by the company ActiveState and is based on the open source Cloud Foundry project. Stackato and HP have partnered in the past, so the move is not entirely a surprise.
Despite HP’s somewhat laggard standing in the market (it wasn’t even included in the latest Gartner IaaS Magic Quadrant), the company does have a robust offering, with a focus on enabling hybrid cloud computing. It offers IaaS, including compute and storage on demand in a public or dedicated cloud, and customers are able to use that same software in their own data centers.
Adding a PaaS to the mix builds HP’s offering to not just run existing workloads, but build new applications on Helion as well. And don’t be surprised to see more consolidation through mergers and acquisitions in the cloud market down the line too. HP bought just ActiveState’s Stackato product for an undisclosed sum, not the entire company. ActiveState has other developer tools including indemnified distributions of various open source language platforms that HP did not buy.
