Hewlett-Packard (HP) has announced the purchase of cloud software company Eucalyptus Software for an undisclosed sum, reports Reuters, gaining some public cloud softwaare and a new cloud vice president.

Eucalyptus, whose open source software is used to build private and hybrid clouds, was originally funded as a start up on the basis of its ability to provide an alternative to Amazon Web Services. In 2012 it received US$30m in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) after it convinced investors that its private cloud building software could emulate the AWS public cloud. The company has received a total of around $100m in funding from Benchmark Capital, BV Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

Early this year HP rebranded its cloud services under the name "Helios", and CEO Meg Whitman told analysts that the company would make acquisitions, if needed, in order to aid its transition to a cloud services company.

This acquisition, it seems, adds some hybrid cloud ability, and also a big industry name, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, to head up its cloud business.

Analyst Clive Longbottom, senior researcher at Quocirca, believes the Eucalyptus tech could allow HP to provide a service akin to AWS.

“The acquisition of Eucalyptus gives HP’s existing cloud offering better capabilities to interoperate with Amazon’s cloud while also providing much-needed provisioning capabilities to bolster HP’s DevOps agility messages,” said Longbottom.

Mickos previously led the open source database company MySQL to a very profitable acquisition by Sun Microsystems in 2008. He is being made vice president of HP's cloud operation, freeing up the current incumbent, Martin Fink to concentrate on his other roles as chief technology officer director of HP Labs.

The high profile of Mickos, and the comparatively low rumoured value of the acquisition ($100 million) have led some to suspect that this is more of an "acqui-hire" to get Mickos into the HP cloud role.

The acquisition is expected to close at the end of Q4 2014, after which Mickos joins HP as senior vice president and head of its cloud business, reporting to Whitman. His brief will be to build HP's Helion cloud computing services, according to an HP statement.

It is the assimilation of the new software company that will be critical, according to analyst Longbottom. “HP’s history in managing software acquisitions is woeful – whether it can do anything meaningful with Eucalyptus remains to be seen,” said Longbottom. “HP has had several bites at the cloud cherry, most of which have not gone far before being dropped.”

Reuters has reported that ‘sources familiar with the deal’ estimate the price of the Eucalyptus acquisition to be ‘less than $100m’.