Forrester expects HP to focus on its strengths – private and hybrid cloud. This is despite its senior vice-president of Helion product management, Bill Hilf, telling The New York Times that it doesn’t make sense for HP to go against Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft.

HP is not alone in not having the capabilities to compete against the big three public cloud providers; in its new research, Forrester writes that Oracle, Rackspace, and SAP don’t have the current capabilities to fully commit to public cloud.

IBM is the most likely candidate to join AWS, Google, and Microsoft in the “big cloud club,” but watch out for Alibaba, which is a potential contender given its financial resources.

As for HP, it will continue to offer OpenStack and Helion internally and through its hosted private cloud services, even if it does reduce its commitment to the public cloud, writes Forrester in new research.

It will also build up Eucalyptus, which brings AWS workloads into private and hybrid cloud deployments.