HP announced a definitive agreement to acquire Eucalyptus, a provider of open source software for building private and hybrid enterprise clouds.
After the transaction closes, Eucalyptus Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Marten Mickos, a respected leader in the cloud industry and a longtime advocate of open source, will join HP as senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud business, reporting to Meg Whitman, chairman, president and chief executive officer of HP.
In this role, Mickos will lead the HP Cloud organization in building out the HP Helion portfolio, based on OpenStack technology. Prior to Eucalyptus, Mickos was CEO of MySQL, which he grew from a garage start-up to the company providing the second most widely used open source software in the world.
Martin Fink, who currently leads HP’s Cloud business, will remain in his roles as chief technology officer of HP and director of HP Labs, where he will focus on innovation and creating groundbreaking solutions like The Machine. Fink will also continue to lead HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business.
Since introducing HP Helion in May, HP has grown share in private cloud and was ranked as the leader in the Forrester Wave report for Private Cloud Solutions. In addition, HP recently announced an agreement to build and operate community clouds for enterprise customers in China, one of the fastest growing cloud markets in the world, and also announced HP Helion OpenStack Professional Services to help enterprises implement OpenStack technology–based clouds. HP is the leading code contributor to the next release of OpenStack code, scheduled for October.