As a long time observer of
As a long time observer of (and former occasional purchaser of kit from) HP and more frequently its predecessors (CPQ, DEC), this looks like an interesting move. In some ways it should have been done five or ten years ago, but would the market have been ready?
And customers of this service will likelystill be horrifyingly dependent on the relevant telecom infrastructure. This morning in the UK, the lovely people at BT Wholesale have an outage at one of a handful of broadband datacentres (Manchester, fwiw) which has blacked out broadband customers of smaller ISPs (including "boutique" ones which are allegedly quality focused for the smaller business) across much of the UK.
Obviously bigger businesses will have invested in resilient redundant connectivity where it matters so incidents like this don't affect them and their usage of "the cloud". Won't they?
What price the cloud when "stuff happens" like that?
And no one really wants a Microsoft cloud, not even MS Premier/Gold/etc partners. Who'da thunk it?