The competitive lines of the public cloud were redrawn once again last week after two of the biggest names on the scene made major changes to their strategic positions. EMC Corp. set off the shift with the announcement of plans to integrate the disparate infrastructure-as-a-service assets scattered throughout its federation into one big division.

The news came against the backdrop of the storage powerhouse’s own merger into Dell Inc., which is keen on eliminating potentially costly organizational redundancies as part of its effort to realize a return on the $67 million it’s paying for the transaction. The move will see VMware Inc.’s struggling vCloud Air suite become part of the Virtustream infrastructure-as-a-service platform that EMC acquired for $1.2 billion earlier this year.

That’s a much better fate for the virtualization giant’s off-premise offering and its development team than the shut-down insiders were expecting as recently as two months ago. Their peers at Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Helion division aren’t as fortunate, however. The company, which is undergoing its own restructuring, announced that it’s pulling the plug on the homegrown public cloud on the same day EMC revealed its plans for Virtustream.  

The abrupt end of HP’s 18-month foray into the infrastructure-as-a-service business can be blamed on the same reason that made it so difficult for vCloud Air to gain ground: Overwhelming competition from existing players. Chief among them are Amazon Inc., Microsoft Corp. and last but not least Google Inc., which are also waging fierce campaigns against one another.

The search giant took the fight to the cloud-based productivity segment last week by launching a new promotion offering organizations switching to Google Apps for Work the ability to use the suite at at no charge if they’re still tied to an agreement with a different vendor. And in particular, Microsoft, which has exploited the restrictiveness of corporate Office licenses to herd users towards the managed version of its document editing bundle.

Photo via Alexis