Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) is buying Stackato, the platform-as-a-service product from partner ActiveState.
The news is not surprising in that HP and ActiveState have been partners for three years, with HP designating Stackato as its development platform of choice for the HP Helion cloud. Stackato itself is based on open-source Cloud Foundry code. ActiveState itself will still field development tools like ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl, and Komodo IDE.
HP, which is the midst of a massive corporate overhaul that will divide the company into two publicly traded companies, has been struggling in the cloud arena. It announced then pulled back on grand plans to offer a public cloud to compete with Amazon(AMZN) Web Services, Microsoft(MSFT) Azure etc.
It fell completely out of Gartner said HP fell out of its closely watched cloud infrastructure provider rankings earlier this year, because it “no longer had sufficient market share.”
HP is now focused on hybrid cloud—the model in which companies with legacy systems keep running some data and applications in house but use outside cloud for other workloads. It’s positioning Stackato as a way boost that hybrid worldview.
Stackato has long run on HP Helion, aka HP’s OpenStack-based cloud, and obviously will continue to do so.
In a statement, Bill Hilf, senior vice president of product and service management for HP Cloud said:
“The Stackato PaaS solution strengthens the HP Helion portfolio and reinforces HP’s commitment to delivering customers open source solutions that help accelerate their transition to hybrid clouds. The acquisition reinforces HP’s focus on driving Cloud Foundry as the open standard cloud native application platform.”
This story was updated to reflect that HP is buying Stackato from ActiveState, not ActiveState itself.
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