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A year ago, Hewlett-Packard thought it was going to change cloud computing. Now it looks more as if cloud computing is changing HP, just as the company enters one of the greatest attempts at reorganization in the history of technology.

Meg Whitman, HP’s chief executive, will at the end of October split HP into two companies. One will be generally focused on business technology and one on consumer-friendly areas of personal computers and printers.

HP thought it would compete with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft for business rentals of computing power via so-called public cloud assets. Companies like Netflix, Snapchat and 3M now run significant parts of their businesses in such clouds, and the field is growing rapidly.

After looking at the market, however, HP is now ceding the public cloud.

“We thought people would rent or buy computing from us,” said Bill Hilf, the head of HP’s cloud business. “It turns out that it makes no sense for us to go head-to-head.”

HP is still selling servers, but increasingly it looks like its biggest customers will be cloud companies themselves, or other computing behemoths, like Facebook. For thousands of other customers, Ms. Whitman hopes to build smaller cloud systems, while figuring out ways these companies can also use Amazon or Microsoft.

One such buyer, the Fox Entertainment Group, uses HP computers to create content, but it looks to Microsoft to run its email or handle heavy workloads of noncritical information

It uses a cloud run by Salesforce.com for sales management, and others to share things like the latest film both with artists inside Fox and with outside special effects and marketing companies.

HP has some business in selling equipment, and more in the related businesses of management and security software, among other things, to hold the disparate parts together.

“We have to balance decisions about the content we’re creating that we have to control with financial and work-flow decisions,” said John Herbert, the chief information officer at Fox. “We’ve pushed HP to give us a lot of automation and flexibility.”

That is a big change after an understandable mistake. HP dominated the sales of computer servers to business, so it probably looked like an easy transition to selling computing in a new way. In fact, the scale of the big public clouds, each with more than one million servers, is hard to learn, and the field is a tough place for newcomers to profit.

Learning about this new world, with a lot of collaboration and many tech providers in a single process, has been something of a shock for HP. If there is a particularly weak spot for HP, it is in better enabling companies to write their own software applications, an increasingly crucial part of corporate tech where HP does not have much of a track record.

Ms. Whitman has now put her engineers and sales force in a crash course in how to cooperate and sell each other’s wares, since clouds tend to promote the sharing of assets and collaboration with different groups in and out of a company. Mr. Hilf compared the re-education to Microsoft’s efforts in 2002 to create more secure software.

“We had a lot of guys who knew how to sell boxes, and they’ve had to learn how to have conversations about downloading apps and developing software,” Mr. Hilf said. “Meg has put out a charter that will make truly engineered systems that we build top to bottom for customers.”

It makes sense for a company that is six months away from a dramatic transformation, but there are questions about how well HP’s people will understand their own jobs in this changed world, or how companies like IBM, which is building its own big cloud, will compete for corporate dollars.