HP's Public Cloud GM Departs

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday confirmed the departure of the architect of its public cloud effort, Zorawar "Biri" Singh, who was senior vice president and general manager.

Singh's departure was first reported by All Things D. Singh oversaw HP's efforts to build a public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that would compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and his former employer IBM.

I spoke with Singh last year and he was quite bullish about HP's prospects in both competing and partnering with Amazon. I'd say it's too early to write that effort off as a failure, but I've also seen little evidence that it has made strong inroads.

CRN raises the question: Was Singh pushed or did he jump? At this time, it's unclear whether he was poached by a competitor or left due to a reorganization that led to the launch of a consolidated Converged Cloud business that combined HP's various cloud efforts.

Under that reorg, former CTO of networking Saar Gillai, who had reported to Singh, was named general manager of the new cross-divisional organization. Gillai now reports to HP COO Bill Veghte. HP's VP of technology and customer operations for its Cloud Services business will run HP Cloud Services in an interim basis.

Have you bought into HP's public and cloud initiative? I'd like to hear how you're using its private and public cloud offerings. Drop me a line at jschwartz@1105media.com or leave a comment below.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 01/18/2013 at 12:48 PM