Hewlett-Packard has hired the man who introduced Microsoft to the notion of open source. His job? To transform HP into a serious cloud player.
Bill Hilf -- who also served as general manager of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service -- left Microsoft for HP this summer, and now serves as HP's vice president of converged cloud products and services. That means he oversees strategy not only for the HP cloud service -- a direct competitor to Windows Azure and the leader in the cloud game, Amazon Web Services -- but also for the HP software and hardware tools that let businesses build private cloud-like services in their own data centers.
"My job is build the future portfolio for HP across the board," he tells WIRED. "That's what I'm in the throes of doing right now."
He made the switch to HP back in June, but the news was not previously reported -- although Hilf listed his new job on his Linkedin profile. Though he spends much of his time at HP's offices in Silicon Valley, he still makes his home in Seattle, Washington, where HP also has an office.
>'HP is in the middle of a tremendous turnaround, and I thought it was time to be part of something like that. It's the original Silicon Valley startup'
Bill Hilf
Hilf originally made a name for himself at IBM in the early aughts, helping Big Blue embrace the granddaddy of the open source game: the Linux operating system. As a senior architect at Big Blue, he built all sorts of big business tech using Linux and other open source software tools, and later, he oversaw open source strategy at IBM, one of the first companies to realize the benefits of software that anyone can use and modify for free.
Microsoft was slow to catch on to the open source game -- very slow. But in 2004, it reached out to Hilf, looking for some guidance. "Microsoft called up and said: ‘We don’t understand this open source stuff. And we need people who do,’” he told us in 2012. “I was like the first astronaut on the planet.”
At first, he was merely a teacher -- someone who showed the company how open source worked. But eventually, he created an open source lab inside Microsoft, hiring a man named Sam Ramji to run it, and he started a dialogue with the open source community, attempting to dispel some of the skepticism -- and anger -- that had built up against the tech giant, which had actively worked to suppress open source projects, seeing them as a threat to the business it had built around proprietary software like the Windows operating system.
They were a threat to its business. But if Microsoft had embraced open source earlier -- listened a bit more to people like Hilf -- it could have avoided a great deal of pain and even used open source to its advantage, as it's trying to do now.
What Microsoft finally realized is that open source makes particular sense in the cloud -- where services are sold, not software -- and it came as no surprise when Hilf made the move to Azure, a service where software developers could build and run applications without setting up their own servers.
Amazon is the king of this cloud game, but it now has countless big name rivals, including HP. Like many of these players, HP is not only offering its own cloud service, but giving businesses the option of setting up their own private services -- for reasons of privacy, security, and, most importantly, control. Hilf will drive all that. "I look across the entire palette of HP assets, from servers and storage and networking to software to anything delivered in the cloud," he says. "And I look at what else we need to build."
The strategy, he explains, is pretty simple. "We want to be the world's best provider for enterprises who want to build 'hybrid clouds' -- things that mix public cloud services with private service that are on premises."
In the face of competition from Amazon -- and so many others -- HP has struggled to find its place in the world over the last few years. But Hilf sees this an opportunity. "HP is in the middle of a tremendous turnaround, and I thought it was time to be part of something like that," he says. "It's the original Silicon Valley startup, and it's transitioning to new growth."
Additional reporting by Robert McMillan
