HP is withdrawing from cloud backup in haste, closing down its HP Upline online backup service for small and medium enterprises.

HP Upline was created by HP after it bought Opelin in November 2007. It was a small company headquartered in San Jose with development labs in India and its CEO was Dave Kleinberg.

The company had launched Titanize, a cloud backup, web file access and synching service for SMEs in the USA. This was the time when online backup services like Mozy were getting a great rep and online backup to the cloud looked a great idea, particularly if you had a good brand image.

The acquisition price wasn't revealed and HP Upline was released in April 2008, and promptly crashed as its infrastructure couldn't withstand the load of users taking advantage of the free trial offer. HP was both right and wrong; brand image was key, but so was a rock-solid infrastructure providing a rock-solid service. There was also the problem that the service was intended for the USA only but its filters did not screen out non-US people.