HP has revealed that the OpenStack-driven HP Helion Public Cloud will close on January 31 2016 as it looks to focus on private and managed cloud offerings, which is says it will now ramp up.

HP announced the news via its blog in which it also revealed that would invest more in the Helion OpenStack platform which, it said, has more realistic prospects for strong customer adoption. The Helion Openstack system is the foundation of its private cloud offering.

Bill Hilf, HP Cloud’s general manager, explained the logic behind the decision. “The market for hybrid infrastructure is evolving quickly. Today, our customers are consistently telling us they want a hybrid combination of efficiently managed traditional IT and private cloud,” said Hilf. They only want access to software as a service (SaaS) applications and public cloud capabilities for certain workloads, he added.

With customers pushing for private cloud to be delivered faster than ever before, the company has had to prioritise, he said.

“We will continue to innovate and grow in our areas of strength, we will continue to help our partners and to help develop the broader open cloud ecosystem, and we will continue to listen to our customers to understand how we can help them with their entire end-to-end IT strategies,” said Hilf.

HP will support its new model by expanding its partner base and integrating different public cloud environments, Hilf said. Customers who want public cloud should go to Amazon, Hilf said.

“For customers who want access to existing large-scale public cloud providers, we have already added greater support for Amazon Web Services as part of our hybrid delivery with HP Helion Eucalyptus,” said Hilf.