HP has inked a definitive agreement to acquire Eucalyptus, a provider of open source software for building private and hybrid enterprise clouds. On closing of the transaction, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos will join HP as senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud business, reporting to chief executive Meg Whitman. In this role, Mr. Mickos will lead the HP Cloud organization in building out the HP Helion portfolio, based on OpenStack technology. Prior to Eucalyptus, Mr. Mickos was CEO of MySQL, which he grew from a garage start-up to the company providing the second most widely used open source software in the world.

Martin Fink, who currently leads HP’s Cloud business, will remain in his roles as chief technology officer of HP and director of HP Labs. Mr. Fink will also continue to lead HP’s Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) business.

HP expects the acquisition to close in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2014. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

[Image courtesy: Eucalyptus]