The Eucalyptus purchase will hardly affect HP's cloud strategy

The acquisition of the privately owned cloud provider Eucalyptus by Hewlett-Packard was indeed not nearly as expensive and risky as the bad buy Autonomy. Nevertheless, insiders wonder what HP seeks it.

In mid-September has announced the Hewlett-Packard cloud providers Eucalyptus to buy and to make their boss, Marten Mickos lord of his cloud business. HP is slowly venturing so back in the market for mergers and acquisitions, after being vigorously burned at the eleven billion dollar acquisitions of Autonomy's fingers. Eucalyptus cost probably only a fraction of that amount - less than $ 100 million are said to have changed hands, say industry rumors.

Mickos is senior vice president and head of the cloud division directly to HP chief Meg Whitman report. In the ICT industry, he is no stranger Mickos was from 2001 to 2008 CEO of MySQL before Sun Microsystems, the company purchased.

With its cloud concepts Mickos was last not on an HP-related course. Publicly he had from time to time against the open source standard expressed OpenStack - the platform, wagered on the Hewlett-Packard its future. Eucalyptus had always been closely contrast to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) with them are Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) oriented.


Eucalyptus offers a open-source implementation of many APIs of Amazon Web Services are used (AWS). Users can workloads between private clouds and public Amazon Cloud back and forth with it. This is useful, for example, startups have developed in an AWS world their business model and now want to move with little effort in the private cloud, or when private clouds are to be expanded.

But HP relies, however, on the more powerful OpenStack framework that has now reached the status of a de facto standard in the industry. For example, had their Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) in 2009 originally constructed based on the Eucalyptus technology, the vendors moved two years later to the OpenStack storage. Eucalyptus could not maintain its market position with the strong AWS focus and maneuvered himself increasingly sidelined. Meanwhile even provides OpenStack itself a set of AWS-compatible APIs, which makes the Eucalyptus technology unnecessary.
Three chefs stirring the cloud pot

Hewlett-Packard had created entirely from scratch in May this year its cloud strategy and announced investments of one billion dollars in Helion - their own OpenStack-based cloud offering, consisting of private, hybrid and public cloud solutions. Bill Hilf and Saar Gillai were presented here as the top manager. Now comes with Eucalyptus CEO Mickos a third cloud chef on board - even to someone who wanted to have nothing to do with OpenStack date.

HP therefore brings with Eucalyptus expertise, technology - and perhaps also problems in the house. But should not affect the strategic direction. Beneficiaries will probably be the OpenStack community, which now has a competitor less and the own Amazon support can again improve with the help of Eucalyptus technology. That will depend on whether HP, whose support for OpenStack is everywhere praised, will make the future even more for the open standard.