

HP buys Eucalyptus as cloud consolidation commences for real - praneshp
https://gigaom.com/2014/09/11/hp-buys-eucalyptus-as-cloud-consolidation-commences-for-real/

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aaronbrethorst

        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.

~~~
imroot
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.

~~~
ams6110
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.

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cratermoon
Cloud consolidation? Wouldn't that be condensation?

~~~
idlewords
Yes. Now it will rain value.

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rdl
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.

~~~
viraptor
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.

------
hkarthik
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...](http://blog.heavybit.com/blog/2014/7/21/video-release-former-mysql-
ceo-on-open-source-business-models)

~~~
praneshp
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 :)

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

~~~
bretpiatt
By what measure is OpenStack struggling?

~~~
hkarthik
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.

