Monty “mordred” Taylor just announced that he’s leaving HP and going to work at IBM. Usually something like this wouldn’t deserve more fanfare than the twittersphere explosion already in act. In this case, I think the announcement is more important than just an OpenStack board member and technical leader changing employer.

Monty says on his blog that he is leaving HP because he wants to build public clouds, implying that he can’t do that at HP. At IBM instead he’ll be focusing on a strong OpenStack-based public cloud, to compete head-to-head with Amazon (and surpass it).

His words confirm the impression I had when analyzing the competitive landscape of public clouds for DreamHost. HP clearly is targeting the enterprise market, with their public cloud used mainly as a supporting mechanism for the private clouds.

I think OpenStack will benefit from more focus on public clouds: I have the feeling those are taken for granted, since there are working groups for pretty much anything but for public clouds. And all operators running large clusters have nightmare stories instead. Hopefully lots of positive changes aimed at public cloud users will keep going upstream (and we can avoid creating yet another working group in openstack-land).