In a shock announcement this morning Hewlett-Packard Company has revealed it’s buying up Eucalyptus, the open-source hybrid cloud software maker that’s been such a hit with customers of Amazon Web Services.

HP has acquired Eucalyptus ostensibly to bolster its Helion Cloud offerings, but what that means for Eucalyptus software remains to be seen. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Reuters is claiming the deal went down for less than $100 million. The deal is likely to close quickly, by the end of October, and will see Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos assume the role of senior vice president of HP’s cloud division.

“Enterprise are demanding open source cloud solutions, and I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to grow the HP Helion portfolio and lead a world-class business that delivers private, hybrid, managed and public clouds to enterprise customers worldwide,” said Mickos in prepared remarks.

Mickos is no stranger to executive roles at large tech companies. He previously held the post of senior vice president at Sun Microsystems after that company acquired database maker MySQL AB, where Mickos had been CEO for seven years.

“The addition of Marten to HP’s world-class Cloud leadership team will strengthen and accelerate the strategy we’ve had in place for more than three years, which is to help businesses build, consume and manage open source hybrid clouds,” Meg Whitman, HP CEO, added in her own statement.

One thing that neither CEO revealed is what the move means for Eucalyptus’ technology itself.

Eucalyptus makes software that allows companies to build private and hybrid clouds that mimic AWS’s own clouds. It allows organizations to build a mini-Amazon cloud in their own data center, so they can easily move apps between Amazon’s cloud and their own (they can tap into Amazon whenever they need extra computing power, a concept known as “hybrid computing”). Naturally Eucalyptus has maintained excellent relations with Amazon so that its customers have minimal problems in moving and sharing resources between AWS and their own clouds.

Eucalyptus’ tech is solid, mature, and has lots of happy customers. But it also has a problem, an OpenStack problem. Most tech industry heavyweights (barring Amazon of course) have backed OpenStack as their open-source cloud of choice, including HP itself. Only recently, HP announced it was to inject $1 billion into building out its own Helion cloud based on OpenStack.

HP’s statement about the acquisition fails to mention Eucalyptus’ software even once, let alone what plans it has for it. All it would say is Mickos is being brought on board to run its Helion cloud.

The obvious theory is that HP will want to incorporate Eucalyptus’ tech into its own Helion cloud. “Eucalyptus has the magic sauce of AWS compatibility, enabling them to move workloads to private or public clouds without application changes,” said Jed Ayres, chief marketing officer of MCPc, a Cleveland-based HP partner. “This means you are going to now get that functionality in Helion, and it’ll be easier to move applications from AWS to Helion.”

As for Eucalyptus’ future as a standalone product, that’s less clear. Last year HP dropped support for Eucalyptus and Amazon’s EC2 APIs to coincide with the general availability of its Helion cloud, something that doesn’t bode particularly well for it. Meanwhile, Ben Kepes at Forbes suggests that HP doesn’t really know what it intends to do with Eucalyptus’ tech:

“Don’t get me wrong – Mickos knows the cloud. Eucalyptus is an interesting project, but within HP it’s hard to see how it won’t wither and die like so many previous cloud initiatives.”

“An HP executive is quoted as saying, when asked how Eucalyptus will play within the broader OpenStack ecosystem: There’s going to be a lot of strategic discussion we have to have about that — how and what makes the most sense over time.”

“What a complete debacle. Where is the strategy? Where is the plan? Where is a single proof point that HP understands how important the cloud is to its future. Bizarre. Just bizarre. “

In a blog post last month, Mickos talked about the financial difficulties Eucalyptus the company has experienced over the last few years, bemoaning the “tsunami” of competition its faced from OpenStack, CloudStack and vCloud Director. “We are unafraid to compete with any OpenStack vendor,” Mickos wrote. “But we are also unafraid of supporting the OpenStack phenomenon. When open source wins, we all win.”

Now it looks as if Mickos is going to be supporting the “OpenStack phenomenon” a lot sooner than he thought.

Recently Martin came back to @theCUBE at AWS ReInvent last year where John Furrier and Stu Miniman interviewed Martin on the state of private public cloud.

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