HPE to Acquire Consultant Cloud Technology Partners

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is beefing up its cloud consultancy capabilities by acquiring Cloud Technology Partners, a company that helps clients devise and implement modern application delivery strategies that include everything from on-premises data centers to Software-as-a-Service.

The move illustrates a new role old-guard enterprise technology giants are carving out for themselves in the cloud marketplace. After several of them tried to become cloud service providers themselves, only to hit reverse in the face of competition from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, they’re now choosing to focus on helping enterprise clients use cloud services others provide as part of diverse (or hybrid) enterprise IT environments.

Dell Technologies has taken this cloud-agnostic path, and so have VMware (which is now majority-owned by Dell), and Cisco, while IBM and Oracle continue to invest in their respective cloud-services businesses.

“We believe most enterprises will operate in this Hybrid IT environment for the foreseeable future,” HPE said in a statement. The company cited the consultancy McKinsey & Company’s estimate that companies spend about $6 billion annually on hybrid IT consulting services and cloud-native development.

CTP helps companies determine which applications are best-suited for public and private cloud delivery models, which are best kept on-premises, and which can be consumed as subscription services (SaaS). It also helps them migrate workloads to the cloud, change organizational structures to support their new delivery models, and, through a suite of manage services, meet their governance, risk, and regulatory requirements.

The company is experienced with a variety of public and private cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and OpenStack, according to HPE.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.