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Biz Break: Hewlett-Packard jumps back into acquisition market with cloud-software buy [San Jose Mercury News :: ](San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 11--Today: Hewlett-Packard acquires a cloud-software startup after pause in merger activity under CEO Meg Whitman's watch. Also: Google also makes an acquisition, Pandora secures another licensing deal. The Lead: Hewlett-Packard acquires Eucalyptus for open-source cloud software Hewlett-Packard announced an acquisition Thursday, a rare occurrence under CEO Meg Whitman, who took over the Palo Alto tech giant not long after the disastrous $11 billion deal for Autonomy. HP's latest purchase is in the software and services market, like Autonomy, but involves much less risk: The company purchased cloud-software startup Eucalyptus for an undisclosed price, which Recode reported was less than $100 million. Eucalyptus is an open-source software company that helps clients connect to public cloud offerings such as Amazon Web Services. The most significant addition from the acquisition appears to be Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, who will take over leadership of HP's cloud division from Chief Technical Officer Martin Fink, who will retain his other duties at the company. "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," Whitman said in Thursday's announcement. Cloud outfits were the main course in a feeding frenzy for software acquisitions in the past few years, with Oracle foregoing its avoidance of the cloud with several big-money acquisitions and rivals such as SAP and Salesforce joining in. HP's big-money software acquisition did not go over well -- under former CEO Leo Apotheker, the company spent nearly $11 billion on British software company Autonomy, but were forced to write down about $8 billion of that total within a year, and accused the company of misrepresenting its financial health ahead of the deal. While dealing with the Autonomy mess, Whitman has avoided big acquisitions despite HP's history of big acquisitions such as the Compaq merger that made HP the world's largest personal-computer manufacturer, a title it relinquished last year. The New York Times reported Thursday that the only other HP acquisition since Autonomy was a small networking software company purchased in March. The acquisition of Eucalyptus is another example of HP's cloud strategy, which involves open-source software such as the OpenStack initiative it has publicly backed, and hybrid clouds that take advantage of data stored on a company's own servers as well as information stored on public servers. Mickos brings a long history of leading open-source cloud efforts, previously serving as CEO of MySQL before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems. "The visions and dreams of the Eucalyptus team, my own passion for leading fast-moving innovative teams, the amazing strength of HP's cloud team, and the ambitious goals of HP overall are coming together," Mickos said in a blog post on the move. The purchase of Goleta-based Eucalyptus is expected to close in the fourth quarter. HP stock fell 0.7 percent to $36.76 and didn't show significant effects after the acquisition was announced following the end of trading. SV150 market report: Tech stocks squeeze out slight gain as Google falls Wall Street suffered through an uneven trading session, with Silicon Valley tech stocks managing a small increase despite a decline from Google. Google announced its own acquisition Thursday, picking up Los Gatos mobile-polling startup Polar for an undisclosed amount to add to the company's Google+ social-networking team. It's the second purchase in two days for the Mountain View search giant, which picked up a health-related startup Wednesday. Amid yet another acquisition spree, Google's shares slipped Thursday, declining 0.4 percent to $591.11 despite analysts predicting that Android's earlier entry into the smartwatch market could help it stay ahead of Apple's upcoming launch of a watch. Apple gained 0.4 percent to $101.43 amid questions about regulations surrounding its mobile-payments offering. Pandora Media pushed 3.2 percent higher after signing a licensing deal with BMG, which follows the Oakland streaming-music company's breakthrough deal with Merlin. eBay fell 0.8 percent to $50.68 while plotting an entry into ad sales for its network of mobile apps, even as the San Jose company's chief technical officer left for personal reasons. VMware fell 0.7 percent after a report suggested EMC is looking to sell its 80 percent stake in the Palo Alto software company, and JDS Uniphase jumped 10.3 percent after announcing a plan to split into two companies. GoPro dropped 0.3 percent to $68.28 after a recent run-up on rumors of a new camera arriving ahead of the holiday shopping season, and Facebook added 0.6 percent to $77.92 while getting little clarity on its future in China. Up: Pandora, Applied Materials, Cisco, Salesforce, Workday, NetApp, Intuit, Facebook, EA Down: LinkedIn, Gilead, Zynga, Nvidia, SanDisk, Yelp, eBay, SunPower, HP, VMware The SV150 index of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies: Up 1.44, or 0.09 percent, to 1,631.43 The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Up 5.28, or 0.12 percent, to 4,591.81 The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Down 19.71, or 0.12 percent, to 17,049 And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 1.76, or 0.09 percent, to 1,997.45 Sign up for the 60-Second Business Break newsletter at www.siliconvalley.com. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/jowens510. ___ (c)2014 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services |