Mårten Mickos ran and sold two open source companies before he ended up in charge of HP’s Helion, an OpenStack-based cloud operation. We caught up with him at the OpenStack Forum in Paris.

Mickos’ big success was selling the open source database company MySQL to Sun for US$1 billion in 2008; observers haven’t all been so positive about the end game for Eucalyptus, the cloud software firm that HP bought earlier in 2014. HP paid less than $100 million according to most analysts, with some saying that a large part of this was an “acqui-hire” deal to get hold of Mickos himself.

Could that be true? Mickos has been an outspoken critic of the OpenStack open source cloud platform, once calling it the “Soviet Union of the cloud”. Eucalyptus was a closed competitor to OpenStack aimed at enabling enterprise infrastructure built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). While OpenStack got everything into the open, Eucalyptus got Amazon’s approval and access to the AWS APIs.

Now Mickos is in charge of, and Eucalyptus is part of, HP’s cloud business - a unit whose future is supposed to be based around OpenStack.

Even given Mickos’ stature, when I meet him at the OpenStack summit in Paris, I had to ask – in the politest possible way – why would HP want either him or his company?

A critical friend
He took the question in his stride. Yes, he says, he is critical of OpenStack – when it needs it. He describes himself as a “critical friend” of the platform. ”I’ve been observing,” he says, “and I think I have the experience to see what the problems are in the OpenStack community - and I can be part of the solution.”

Eucalyptus and OpenStack were competitors, he agrees. Eucalyptus was created as an open source platform to build clouds, focused around one public cloud provider. OpenStack emerged, with the support of hoster Rackspace, from NASA, as a platform to build private clouds.

Eucalyptus features prominently in the history of OpenStack - NASA started with a fork of Eucalyptus for its Nebula compute environment, later replaced by Nova as the compute part of what would eventually become OpenStack.

Today, OpenStack is a huge collaborative project, with around 2000 developers worldwide. Eucalyptus has only 100, and Mickos acknowledges OpenStack’s success: “We decided one year ago to take Eucalyptus into OpenStack,” he says - and in August Mickos (still at Eucalyptus) even gave a keynote at an OpenStack event.

Eucalyptus sticks around
That means Eucalyptus is contributing to OpenStack, but it doesn’t make it an official OpenStack project. What use is that to HP, I ask Mickos. Will Eucalyptus go away?

“We chose a very specific strategy of being Amazon compatible and very easy to operate,” he answers. “In those two criteria, nobody comes close to us.” Accoridng to Mickos, Eucalyptus had a solid role outside of HP, with a large number of users such as Nokia, F-Secure and NASA – though we’d bet that many of these predate OpenStack, and any without specific AWS requirements may well have moved on.

Eucalyptus fills a gap in HP’s cloud, he reckons. Before the acquisition HP had “no Amazon story whatsoever”, he says. “Eucalyptus will handle the Amazon compatible stuff for… well, for ever.”

If it’s that good, why not turn it into an official OpenStack project? “The OpenStack world has always discussed whether or not they should have Amazon compatibility,” he says, adding that there’s no urgency to change the governance of Eucalyptus (or to lose control of it). And in any case it couldn’t happen without the say-so of the OpenStack Foundation, which isn’t likely to be forthcoming.

“It is not our first priority. The first question is how we serve our customers.”

Where is Helion going?

Mickos is not making any changes to HP’s direction – “I joined because I agree with the strategy” – but he says there’s an urgent need to get stuff out to customers: “In the next twelve months I will be very product focused.”

What he did is reorganize HP’s cloud business unit and get key people in place. The Helion 1.0 release came out in October, and will be followed by others on the same six-month release cycle as the underlying OpenStack code, with interim updates every six to eight weeks.

And what is special about HP’s version of OpenStack? “It is a question of adding features,” he says. “We take the OpenStack trunk, package it, add our own secret sauce and ship it as Helion. There is very little in the open source that doesn’t exist in our product.”

Exactly what gets added and why, can be a moral and practical issue in the open source world. Big players like HP and Red Hat, who have their own products which existed before OpenStack are often criticized for adding features that effectively tie users into their own code and other products.

“Red Hat and HP take the same core form the OpenStack Foundation and we both add our magic sauce to it, and then ship it to customers,” says Mickos. He reckons Red Hat doesn’t do very much, mostly adding “packaging and delivery”.

Proprietary software firms like VMware and Microsoft get more criticism. Even when they offer an OpenStack distribution it’s just a check-box item:  “VMware has an OpenStack implementation – but do they hope to sell any copies of it? No.”

Proprietary cloud goes on

But wait a minute! HP has the proprietary Cloud System products. “Those are selling wonderfully well, for private and hybrid cloud,” Mickos tells me. “We have a giant business running on those.”

So isn’t HP open to the same accusations as VMware or Microsoft, of having an open source product to legitimize the proprietary business? He denies this.

“For Helion, we don’t have a giant business yet, but it’s the next generation,” he says.”The world needs cloud and will refuse to use closed source products. We believe OpenStack is going to succeed.”

Why should we believe Mickos? “I have promised uncompromising integrity and I will not oversell even when talking to a journalist,” he says. “It would be tempting, because you could get away with it once or twice.”

Existing proprietary cloud customers will move onto OpenStack if and when they want to, he adds, because each generation of technology is suitable for particular uses. ”A company that keeps running old workloads forever will keep the old cloud platform forever. When we say we offer choice, that is what we mean. You can be on CloudSystem for as long as you like, or you can migrate it over to OpenStack.

In a sense, that’s no difference from the way HP continues to support its old pre-cloud workhorses, like HP-9000 and OpenVMS. It sounds likeThe OpenStack option will mostly be offered to customers wanting to try the new world out.

“It’s easier to be a startup because you can disrupt everything, and retire easily because you never have to migrate to the new [equipment]. HP has said it will honour the existing workloads and be a leader in the new ones - and we must become a master of the transition.”

Killing with a smile
You also have to take two tacks with other vendors, co-operating on writing the open source code, and competing on selling the products.

“Competing is fun,” he says, claiming that HP is the top contributor in the Juno release of OpenStack. “We work with red Hat, for instance to make OpenStack ready, but the moment a customer comes with a purchase order we fight fiercely”.

“When it comes to community we have endless empathy and love. We kill them with a smile.”