Hewlett-Packard (HP) is back shopping for little companies to snap up, and one of its first acquisitions since its disastrous buy-out of Autonomy in 2011 is Eucalyptus, an open source cloud company that will give HP an ace against rival Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The deal, which some HP partners consider a bold move for HP, gives the company the upper hand in its strategy to "help businesses build, consume and manage open source hybrid clouds" with its Helion portfolio of cloud services.
Eucalyptus specializes in creating private cloud computing systems for enterprises, which gives them more efficiency, privacy and security by using cloud computing in their data centers. It provides what is known as hybrid clouds, which lets users seamlessly tap into the public cloud such as Amazon's AWS for extra computing power when they need to. Amazon itself did not have private cloud technology until it landed a contract with the U.S Central Intelligence Agency. Private enterprises, including F-Secure and Nokia, go to Eucalyptus for their hybrid cloud services.
"Eucalyptus has the magic sauce of AWS compatibility, enabling them to move workloads to private or public clouds without application changes," says Jed Ayres, chief marketing officer of MCPc, a Cleveland-based HP partner. "This means you are going to now get that functionality in Helion, and it'll be easier to move applications from AWS to Helion."
Perhaps more important than Eucalyptus hybrid technologies, however, is the acqui-hire of Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, who is considered something like a rock star in the open source industry for his first start-up MySQL, which produced what became the second most popular open-source software in the world. Mickos sold MySQL to Sun Microsystems in 2008 for $1 billion.
Mickos will report directly to HP CEO Meg Whitman as the new senior vice president and general manager of HP's cloud business. His task is to oversee the development of OpenStack based Helion cloud services. Once a harsh critic of OpenStack, Mickos likened the open-source platform to the "Soviet Union of cloud," where nothing is actually accomplished despite a long list of corporate backers. In recent times, however, Mickos has been less tough, even speaking to an OpenStack event at this year's Structure and saying that he "wants OpenStack to succeed."
"The addition of Marten to HP's world-class Cloud leadership team will strengthen and accelerate the strategy we've had in place for more than three years, which is to help businesses build, consume and manage open-source hybrid cloud," says Whitman in a statement.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but sources tell Re/code that HP spent less than $100 million to purchase Eucalyptus, which raised $55 million in venture funding from investors such as Benchmark Capital, e.ventures, Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates.
