Why did Citrix invest in Vyatta?

A short while ago, Vyatta announced that it had completed its series C round of funding and that that the round was lead by Citrix Systems (more information about this round can be found here). Since I've watched both companies for quite some time, I spent a bit of time thinking about this move, the reasons for it and the possible outcome.

• Cisco's move into the industry standard systems market has had a broad, strategic impact. It is not likely that Dell, HP, IBM and other system suppliers will walk away from their long-time relationship with Cisco. What is likely is that these suppliers, along with their partners, are going to seek out a way to counter that move by developing their own network virtualization strategy. Vyatta stands to gain more attention, more friends and more deployments.
• Citrix is looking for friends that can help it manage a number of intractable issues including: walking the fine line between being the leader of an open source community (the Xen community), being a supplier of commercial technology, living right at the epicenter of the Microsoft versus Open Source conflict and orchestrating a deep, broad competition with VMware. Yvatta contributes a strong open source community and provides capabilities that VMware currently does not have.
• Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to virtualize and orchestrate more components of their workloads to increase levels of performance, reliability, availability while also reducing the overall costs of hardware and software. Yvatta adds network virtualization to Citrix and its partners portfolio.

I could go on and on about the deep and broad ramifications of this move, but I think that you get the point.  This was a move that was good for both companies and will help organizations move yet another critical function into a virtual environment.

Dell, HP, IBM are you watching?  I believe you would gain some important ground in your emerging competition with Cisco by also becoming buddies with Vyatta.