Hewlett-Packard Company’s cloud division is in the midst of a management reshuffle, with reports suggesting that senior vice president Marten Mickos, formerly the CEO of cloud vendor Eucalyptus, has stepped down from day-to-day operations to be replaced by some familiar faces.

GigaOM first broke the news on Monday, while The Register later published details of a leaked internal memo that apparently confirmed it: “As we look at both the short and long term strategic direction of our business, the time is now to open up some additional bandwidth at the leadership level to focus on placing some longer term bets,” wrote Mickos in the memo.

The move is a bit of a surprise, given that Mickos only joined HP six months ago after the company swallowed up cloud computing startup Eucalyptus. That acquisition raised a few eyebrows at the time, given how Eucalyptus makes open-source software for building cloud computing environments that are compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS). HP’s Helion cloud services are instead built using OpenStack and the company’s own proprietary software, and are not compatible with AWS’ cloud, although that may ultimately change once HP properly integrates Eucalyptus’ know-how into its own offering.

As Jed Ayres, chief marketing officer of MCPc, a Cleveland-based HP partner, said at the time: “Eucalyptus has the magic sauce of AWS compatibility, enabling them to move workloads to private or public clouds without application changes. This means you are going to now get that functionality in Helion, and it’ll be easier to move applications from AWS to Helion.”

That hasn’t happened yet, and now Mickos has apparently stepped down, and will instead take up a “customer engagement and advocacy” role within HP. Whether or not that changes HP’s plans for Eucalyptus remains to be seen, but it’s probably a bit of a blow for Mickos himself.

“It’s hard to see how that’s not a serious demotion, Mickos becomes essentially a cheerleader for HP’s cloud product, Helion, while others take up the leadership roles,” surmised Ben Kepes in Forbes.

There’s a trio of familiar faces who’ll instead be taking up the roles Mickos used to fill. Former Microsoft man Bill Hilf moves up to take over product management for Helion, while Kerry Bailey will be heading up sales. Finally, Mark Interrante, formerly of Rackspace, moves up to manage Helion’s cloud engineering team.

Image Credit: Andrew Smart of AC Cooper via Wikipedia