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HP Steals Start Up Company Eucalyptus from Amazon.com
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 12 2014 : Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) is buying cloud-computing software developer Eucalyptus Systems Inc as chief executive officer Meg Whitman embarks on new acquisitions to bolster the computer maker’s businesses.
Eucalyptus, founded in 2009, provides technology that lets companies store, process and deliver computing data via the Internet.
Eucalyptus has long been allied with Amazon. The companies forged a wide-ranging agreement in early 2012 to work together on making Eucalyptus’s technology better fit Amazon’s cloud-computing services.
Eucalyptus’s open-source software is designed to let administrators manage corporate data centres in the same way they would run cloud-computing services from Amazon.
Eucalyptus offers broad support for Amazon’s application programming interfaces, or APIs, which let computers exchange data with each other in a common language.
The Goleta, California-based company has raised US$55.5 million (RM177.4 million) in three financing rounds. HP is paying less than US$100 million, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
The deal marks a return to mergers and acquisitions for Whitman after a dry spell following HP’s US$8.8 billion writedown of Autonomy Corp in 2012, a year after buying the data software company for US$10.3 billion.
HP, the world’s second-largest seller of server computers, is seeking to add customers setting up their own cloud networks.
As part of the acquisition, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will join HP as senior vice president.
He takes over as general manager of HP’s cloud-computing business, replacing Martin Fink, who previously led the cloud unit and will remain as chief technology officer and director of HP Labs, the Palo Alto, California-based company said in a statement yesterday. Mickos will report directly to Whitman.
HP’s cloud-computing hardware, software and services are sold under the name HP Helion and compete with Internet-hosted services from Amazon.com Inc, Google Inc and Microsoft Corp, as well as software sold by VMware Inc, Citrix Systems Inc, Red Hat Inc and others.
“We can help you build the cloud you want your way versus trying to get you to commit to our products,” Bill Hilf, senior vice president of HP’s cloud product management organisation, said in a telephone interview.
HP Helion products are based on OpenStack, a different cloud-computing software standard that has its own set of APIs. Mickos said in early August that he wanted Eucalyptus to become more involved in OpenStack.
Mickos was previously CEO of database-software company MySQL, which was bought by Sun Microsystems in 2008. He worked as a vice president at Sun until March 2009.
Eucalyptus has struggled to keep pace with developments in the fast-changing cloud-computing market. Mickos wrote in a blog post in August that “we have turned around the Eucalyptus ship” after challenging conditions in 2010.
HP said the Eucalyptus deal will probably be completed within the current fiscal year, which ends in October.
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