HP Mum On LinkedIn Public Cloud Strategy Leak

Scott McClellan, HP's vice president and chief technologist of cloud services, posted detailed information about HP's public cloud strategy on his public-facing LinkedIn profile. The information on HP's cloud plans was quickly removed, but not before it was captured and published by The Register.

In an e-mail to CRN, HP refused to comment on how long the cloud plans were on McClellan's LinkedIn page; whether that information was accurate; if McClellan will face any disciplinary action; or how the data made it to McClellan's LinkedIn profile in the first place. McClellan is responsible for driving the technical strategy, architecture and business direction as a co-founder for HP Cloud Services.

McClellan's LinkedIn lapse comes as HP seeks to become a leader in the public cloud space. Last month, CEO Leo Apotheker unveiled HP's plans for the cloud, which include a three-pronged cloud assault. First, the company plans to help customers transition to the cloud and build cloud infrastructures; second, it is working on a cloud platform; and it is building an open cloud marketplace and prepping a cloud ecosystem.

While HP refused to comment on McClellan's slip-up or the specifics that were shared via LinkedIn, the company did reiterate its general cloud plans.

"We've stated that HP plans to build a full cloud stack and help transition customers to hybrid cloud environments," HP said in a statement e-mailed Wednesday to CRN. "HP intends to leverage its scale, reliability and security in its current hardware, software and services offerings. HP also plans to grow its higher-value services that offer greater strategic value."

HP's cloud statement continued: "On March 14, we also revealed a plan to build an open applications marketplace that integrates consumer, enterprise and developer services. The platform will support multiple languages and will be open to third-parties. HP will vet applications for security and interoperability to facilitate an environment that is both trusted and open. A device-aware HP cloud will configure and send the appropriate services to the device that the customer is using, and connected devices will intuitively access services the customer needs."

On LinkedIn, McClellan's wrote HP plans to launch an "object storage" service that the company built from scratch, which is likely a data storage offering similar to Amazon Web Services' Simple Storage Service (S3). HP plans for a "compute," "networking," and "block storage" service that McClellan wrote is an "innovative and highly differentiated approach to 'cloud computing' -- a declarative/model-based approach where users provide a specification and the system automates deployment and management; and common/shared services that offer user management, key management, identity management and federation, authentication, authorization, auditing, billing and metering and more.

Additionally, McClellan wrote on his LinkedIn page, that HP is creating a Web site and developer suite that will offer APIs and language bindings for Java, Ruby and other open source languages and a fully functional GUI and CLI. HP is also cooking up quality assurance, code and design inspection processes and security and penetration testing as part of its cloud strategy, McClellan wrote.