Meg Whitman, Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard at the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is planning to announce a new product called OneSphere that could help companies track when employees use public clouds like Amazon Web Services.

HPE filed a trademark application late last month for OneSphere. The description of the product included with the application is wide-ranging but has several references to hardware, and implies that OneSphere will help customers track and reduce the amount of money they're spending on clouds like AWS.

The trademark application also hints at how people could use OneSphere to move applications across computing environments -- from AWS to a corporate data center, for example.

The exploration of those areas is fascinating given that HPE chose to wind down its own public cloud, which competed with the likes of AWS and Microsoft Azure in early 2016.

HPE declined to comment. But a source familiar with the matter said the company is preparing to unveil OneSphere later this month.

HPE does use the term "cloud management" to market some of its software products. So the company isn't looking to go in a completely new direction. But HPE appears to be readying something that involves hardware, while most competing products for public cloud management have been software-only. Much of HPE's revenue comes from hardware.

Since splitting off from HP Inc., HPE has offloaded a few of its previous properties, including its enterprise services business and non-core software holdings. Meanwhile, Microsoft has acquired a cloud cost management start-up called Adallom and incorporated the technology into Azure.