HP buys Eucalyptus as cloud consolidation commences for real | Hacker News Reader

HP buys Eucalyptus as cloud consolidation commences for real

gigaom.com

50 pointspraneshp14 comments

    Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but
    Eucalyptus had raked in something like $55
    million in venture funding since it was
    founded in 2010. Some estimate that HP may
    have paid up to $100 million for Eucalyptus,
    its IP and some 70 employees.

An acquihire. It's amazing that Eucalyptus was able to burn through that much money in such a short amount of time with not that many employees. I wonder what the behind the scenes story was.

It's possible 70 employees was not their highest headcount, and that they had not burned through all of the funding. Also, by virtue of their product, they might have had above average capex for hardware & hosting fees. Just speculation.

I worked at Eucalyptus for a few months in 2010.

From my point of view, the biggest pain points were:

- Below market salary, even for Santa Barbara.

- Seven Ph.D's running development seven different ways, leading to:

- Many Silos between departments, development, and delivery.

Even with all of that said, they were an amazing company to work for and had an amazing team of software developers, sales folks, and support team. I remember one day that Marten came in after Enterprise gave him a very nice Audi Convertible as a rental and he threw his keys in the middle of the engineering fishbowl telling the developers to take it out for a spin.

I believe I was employee 35-ish. I know that a few of the founders had plans to get sports jerseys made when they hit 50 employees with numbers 1-50 on the back.

Congrats to the team.

Eucalyptus was an academic project that spun off into a commercial product. That may explain all the Ph.Ds and academic approach to things.

I found Eucalyptus to be hard to set up and get working, tedious to manage, and unreliable. Pretty clearly the momentum has been with OpenStack the past couple of years.

Marten is an amazing guy. I bet most of the price that HP will pay is to get him.

Cloud consolidation? Wouldn't that be condensation?

Yes. Now it will rain value.

I was wondering the other day why HP wouldn't just buy Rackspace -- HP push into managed services, plus the OpenStack clouds at each, would make some sense.

The offer is quite different actually if you look at it - Rackspace will take everyone with a credit card at the moment. Rackspace is stuck on a custom implementation of many things too - no real neutron networking, custom plugin for auth, very limited network management (even compared to public hpcloud). Then again they have new performance/SSD flavours available.

There's also a big push for providing ready, packaged cloud infrastructure using HP Helion. That's not exactly what Rackspace guys are doing.

Seems like a great fit! I saw a talk given at HeavyBit from Marten Minks about Open Source Business models. Really good stuff.

http://blog.heavybit.com/blog/2014/7/21/video-release-former...

On Quora, the Eucalyptus CEO was once a big openstack critic. He slowly seemed to mellow down, and finally seems to have joined the other side :)

Openstack is struggling and this acquisition is a huge shot in the arm for Eucalyptus. I think he did quite well.

By what measure is OpenStack struggling?

In the startup world, it's definitely struggling. But I think it's doing far better in Enterprises that are building private clouds.

When a startup is faced with setting up a complicated OpenStack environment versus just using AWS, it's a no brainer to go with AWS.

For an established enterprise, it's a different decision. They often have lots of legacy applications, enterprise apps like Oracle/SAP, etc that can't just go right on AWS without issue. For them, Private Cloud vendors selling interoperable solutions on top of OpenStack are very attractive.

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