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Citrix's acquisition of Cloud.com: Last piece for VMware assault

By | July 12, 2011, 8:55am PDT

Summary: Citrix acquired Cloud.com, which is best known for its Cloud Stack set of open services. The move steps up Citrix’s competition with VMware and gives the company an interesting mix of assets.

Citrix on Tuesday acquired Cloud.com, which is best known for its Cloud Stack set of open services. The move steps up Citrix’s competition with VMware and gives the company an interesting mix of assets.

Cloud.com is a virtualization hypervisor agnostic way to build public and private cloud computing systems. For Citrix, the acquisition will make it a major player in the OpenStack effort as well as put it in a position to be the alternative to VMware (statement, FAQ, Techmeme).

VMware has its own cloud strategy as it tries to leverage its virtualization dominance into clouds. VMware is also moving upstream to management software as the hypervisor becomes a commodity. In other words, VMware wants to be the operating system of choice for the cloud, but Red Hat, Citrix and others beg to differ.

With Cloud.com, Citrix’s line-up will include virtualization, networking tools and orchestration software. Toss in mobile and Web-based products like Citrix Receiver and GoToMeeting and it’s a strong line-up. As a bonus, Citrix gets a great URL.

In the big picture, Citrix is positioning itself as a leading open cloud computing player. The company pledged support for its XenServer hypervisor as well as VMware vSphere as well as Xen. Citrix will also add support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and System Center to Cloud.com. With Cloud.com, Citrix will also have more heft in the OpenStack movement, which is an open source cloud stack. The company added that it will enable Cloud.com support for OpenStack.

Krishnan Subramanian has a good analysis of the Citrix-Cloud.com fallout.

See Citrix, VMware topic pages.

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Topics

Acquisition, Citrix Systems Inc., VMware Inc., Cloud.com, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Hardware, Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

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Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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Mathew Vaughn
Bonchucin 18th Jul
The acquisition might be great news for Cloud.com, but there is a real danger of it slowing down the emergence of public cloud services and limiting the options of cloud customers. Despite the cloud explosion in the media, even today there are only 500 public cloud service providers in the world. Compared to the 33,000 hosting companies worldwide, it?s a very small percentage that can actually put public cloud services in the hands of customers. With Citrix and CA Technologies calling the shots over who makes it as a cloud service provider, we may start to see a squeeze on the speed of delivery of cloud services which will fall behind customer demand. Smaller hosting companies will actually be the biggest driver of public cloud provisioning, but they won?t necessarily meet the revenue or scale requirements of the newly consolidated big boys to get access to the software they need to start offering cloud services. Ultimately users will be forced to buy in a constrained market, which could trigger a rise in pricing, further delaying the advance of the public cloud. Source: http://cloudtechsite.com/news/citrix-swigs-open-stack-ally-cloud-com.html
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RE: Citrix's acquisition of Cloud.com: Last piece for VMware assault
qnetter 12th Jul
One minor quibble: Citrix is already a major player in OpenStack -- the number-two contributor, for one. (Including the OpenStack support of not only XenServer, but also VMware's hypervisor.)
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Mathew Vaughn
Bonchucin 18th Jul
The acquisition might be great news for Cloud.com, but there is a real danger of it slowing down the emergence of public cloud services and limiting the options of cloud customers. Despite the cloud explosion in the media, even today there are only 500 public cloud service providers in the world. Compared to the 33,000 hosting companies worldwide, it?s a very small percentage that can actually put public cloud services in the hands of customers. With Citrix and CA Technologies calling the shots over who makes it as a cloud service provider, we may start to see a squeeze on the speed of delivery of cloud services which will fall behind customer demand. Smaller hosting companies will actually be the biggest driver of public cloud provisioning, but they won?t necessarily meet the revenue or scale requirements of the newly consolidated big boys to get access to the software they need to start offering cloud services. Ultimately users will be forced to buy in a constrained market, which could trigger a rise in pricing, further delaying the advance of the public cloud. Source: http://cloudtechsite.com/news/citrix-swigs-open-stack-ally-cloud-com.html

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