HP Acquires Eucalyptus

Yesterday HP announced to have reached a definitive agreement to acquire Eucalyptus, provider of an open source Cloud Solution competing with OpenStack, CloudStack and OpenNebula.

This acquisition will put the Eucalyptus CEO, Marten Mickos, in charge of the company’s cloud business unit, based on HP Helion portfolio that leverages OpenStack technology.

The economic terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and the press release only stresses how Eucalyptus will provide a valuable experience with private clouds deployments that also interoperate with Amazon AWS, where actually Eucalyptus products have always demonstrated a good maturity degree.

This move has no simple interpretations and raises even more doubts about the existence of an actual cloud strategy inside HP.
Until now, in fact, the company only appeared as a follower compared to its direct competitors in the market and the acquisition of Mickos, historically sceptic about OpenStack, resembles the hiring of Alessandro Perilli made six months ago from Red Hat.

The only truth is that open source clouds market is consolidating in the hands of few big players and less and less space is left for the small realities mentioned above, we will see if a fair competition will still be possible.