Hewlett-Packard has agreed to buy cloud platform provider Eucalyptus, stepping up HP’s efforts in the growing field of cloud computing,
Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will manage HP’s cloud business and report directly to Meg Whitman, HP’s chairman, president and CEO, HP announced Thursday.
Mickos will manage and build out HP’s Helion portfolio, a set of software products for running internal and external cloud services on the OpenStack platform. His title will be senior vice president and general manager for HP Cloud.
Terms of the acquisition, including how much HP will pay, weren’t disclosed. HP expects to complete the acquisition by the end of October.
Prior to starting Eucalyptus, Mickos made his name as CEO of MySQL, which he helped to make the most widely used open-source database. He’s also a vocal advocate of open-source software in the enterprise.
The current director of HP’s cloud business, Martin Fink, will continue in his other roles at HP, those of CTO and director of HP Labs. He will also lead its network virtualization projects.
Whitman pledged in May to invest US$1 billion in HP’s cloud efforts. It streamlined its cloud computing services and software under the Helion brand, and set out to establish a federation of third-party service providers that use Helion in their operations.
Eucalyptus offers an open-source implementation of many of the APIs (application programming interfaces) used by Amazon Web Services. The software can provide a way for organizations to build their own AWS-like private clouds and move workloads back and forth between their internal data centers and the AWS service.