MySQL Veteran Marten Mickos Joins Eucalyptus Systems

Eucalyptus Systems, the open souce cloud computing company that we've covered numerous times, has announced that former MySQL chief Marten Mickos is its new CEO. Some initial details on the deal appeared in The New York Times on Friday.

Mickos will face a new set of challenges at Eucalyptus, which is focusing on platforms and services for facilitating flexible, private and public cloud solutions. He brings with him a long history of overseeing commercial open source projects.

Mickos oversaw the $1 billion sale of the MySQL database division to Sun Microsystems, prior to Sun's acquisition by Oracle. He stayed at Sun for a period, and was appointed entrepreneur in residence at the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital last year. Previously, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He is currently a member of the board of directors at RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.

“Marten is unmatched in his ability to blend open-source business techniques and technologies to build an industry leading company. We are both thrilled and honored to have the opportunity to work with him and look forward to seeing his knowledge and boundless energy move Eucalyptus forward,” commented Rich Wolski, CTO and co-founder at Eucalyptus Systems, in a statement. “The open source Eucalyptus software, with full compatibility with public clouds, has quickly become the de facto standard for private cloud computing. Working with Marten will help us capitalize on our position in the market.”

 Eucalyptus' open source software is designed to facilitate flexible cloud computing using an organization’s own secure IT infrastructure, without modification, special-purpose hardware or reconfiguration.  Its platform turns data center resources such as machines, networks, and storage systems into a cloud that is controlled and customized by local IT.

Mickos is quite experienced with the world of IT, as MySQL has become very popular with many IT organizations over the years, and is used at the departmental level at many companies. He is also a very well-known and visible member of the open source community who will likely help young Eucalyptus Systems form more key partnerships. Among other existing partnerships that the company has, its software is used as the cloud platform for the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, which includes Ubuntu's open-source operating system.

Image credit: Business Wire.