HP buys cloud software company Eucalyptus to restart acquisition business

September 12, Hewlett-Packard announced in Thursday that the company will acquire enterprise-class cloud computing solution Provider Eucalyptus BAE (hereinafter referred to as "Eucalyptus"). It is also the first acquisition by Hewlett-Packard since 2011, when it spent $10.3 billion on acquisition of British software company Autonomy, indicating that its chief executive, Meg Whitman, will use a new round of mergers and acquisitions to boost the company's business.

Eucalyptus, based in Golita, California, was founded in 2009 and has already raised 55.5 million of billions of dollars through its rounds of financing. According to sources, the price of HP's acquisition of Eucalyptus is less than 100 million dollars.

After Hewlett-Packard's 2011 takeover of Autonomy, the company counted 8.8 billion dollars in impairment payments for the transaction in the following year. HP has not had a merger deal. The acquisition eucalyptus that Whitman's Hewlett-Packard will begin a new merger deal. As the world's second-largest server maker, HP is seeking to expand the number of clients that build its own cloud network.

As part of the deal, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mix (Marten Mickos) will join Hewlett-Packard as senior vice president of the company. In a Thursday statement, Hewlett-Packard said Meeks would take over the job of Martin Fink Martin Fink as general manager of HP's cloud computing operations. The former head of Hewlett-Packard's cloud computing division will continue to serve as CTO and director of HP Labs (HP Labs). Meeks will report directly to Whitman.

HP's cloud computing hardware, software, and services are sold through the name "HP Helion" and are in confrontation with services from Amazon, Google (Weibo), Microsoft, and VMware, Citrix Bae, and red Hat companies.

Cloud

Eucalyptus has been allied with Amazon since its establishment. The two companies signed a series of agreements early in 2012 to collaborate to make Eucalyptus's technology more adaptable to Amazon's cloud computing services.

Eucalyptus's Open-source software is designed to allow administrators to manage enterprise data centers in the same way that they run Amazon's cloud computing services. Eucalyptus provides a series of support for Amazon's application interface, allowing computers to exchange data with one another in a common language.

HP's HP Helion products use another cloud computing software standard OpenStack, which has its own set of application interfaces. Meeks earlier this August that he wanted eucalyptus to be more relevant to OpenStack.

Meeks previously served as chief executive of MySQL, the database software company, which was acquired by Sun in 2008. Before March 2009, Meeks served as Sun Vice president. Later, Sun was acquired by Oracle.

Hewlett-Packard said the acquisition of Eucalyptus will be completed by the end of October this fiscal year. Hewlett-Packard's shares fell 0.27 U.S. dollars in the NYSE's regular trading in Thursday, down 0.73% per cent to 36.76 dollars. In the past 52 weeks, HP's lowest share price was $20.25, with a maximum of 38.25 dollars.

(Responsible editor: Lvguang)