Workday Comments on HP-Amazon Controversy

Workday and Hewlett-Packard are involved in a deal that seems as though it will tread on Amazon cloud territory. 

Bill Veghte, the HP Chief Operating Officer, noted that the company had moved Workday over from Amazon’s public cloud to HP’s.

The Chairman at Workday, Aneel Bhusri, noted that it would not be abandoning Amazon Web Services for HP, as might have been implied by Veghte.

Bhusri said: “We're happy customers of both,” speaking at the GigaOM Structure 2013 conference last week in San Francisco, California.

Workday is a software-as-service provider based in Pleasanton, California, and calls itself the enterprise cloud for human resources and finance, using Amazon and HP servers for internal development. Bhusri said: “Two sources are very common in the world of IT.”

Since its initial statement, HP has issued an apology for misstating the impact of the public cloud deal with Workday on Amazon Web Services. In a statement, HP said: “During our HP Discover event, HP was very pleased to announce Workday as a customer for HP's public cloud. However, we misstated the impact of that announcement on Workday's relationship with Amazon Web Services. We apologize for the mistake.”

Werner Vogels, the Amazon Chief Technology Officer, said that it was not possible to converse directly regarding the deal. Server vendors are driving Amazon’s competition, according to Vogels, and this includes HP which is becoming a more prominent figure in the public cloud scene and a potential rival to Amazon.

Vogels stated: “We always knew this was not a winner-take-all landscape,” in reference to the incursion into the public cloud by traditional IT players like HP and IBM. Last year, he called the traditional enterprise IT “dinosaurs.”

Last week, Vogels commented: “We've always strongly believed we should be focusing on our customers, making it easier for [them] to do things in the cloud.” He added that this includes additional security and easy scalability which means that the end user has more control; anything which increases customers’ comfort zone and means that the public cloud can take advantage of the potentially lucrative enterprise market.

In January, Amazon Web Services won a 10-year CIS cloud computing deal valued at $600 million, in spite of the fact that it is more expensive to develop and operate IBM’s bid. Vogels stated that the government ended up choosing quality over price, and said: “We could get the job done with superior technology.” (CY) Link