Cloud M&A: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com

Citrix has acquired Cloud.com, adding the CloudStack IaaS platform for service providers to a cloud portfolio that already includes Xen and NetScaler. Essentially, Citrix is looking to capitalize on the burgeoning cloud service provider marketplace, which it sees as worth $8 billion by the end of 2013.

TalkinCloud’s been following Cloud.com closely for a while now. Its flagship CloudStack offering is designed to both be affordable and speed time-to-market for service providers with a scalable, efficient, hypervisor-agnostic, automated public cloud platform. Providers including Tata Communications and Logicworks use CloudStack in their data centers to power public cloud offerings, while companies such as Appcore use the platform for private clouds.

And in its press materials, Citrix said the two companies have a dovetailing interest in open source that will be maintained going forward. In fact, Citrix plans to leverage Project Olympus and extend OpenStack support to the Cloud.com product line.

Here’s Citrix’s so-called “talking point” on the value of the Cloud.com acquisition:

With the addition of Cloud.com, Citrix now offers an unparalleled portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for the Cloud Era – solutions that are not only best in class individually, but also designed to work with the hardware, software and management products customers already have deployed.

Cloud.com CloudStack will continue to support the open source Xen hypervisor, as well as commercial offerings such as VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer. Part of Citrix’s focus on further developing CloudStack will be adding support for Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center. Additionally, CloudStack will soon support platform-as-a-service environments, as well as additional server and storage hardware.

As far as talent, Citrix affirms that Cloud.com’s executive team will be transitioning to the newly formed Cloud Platforms division, with Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang continuing to lead CloudStack development efforts. Moreover, Christian Reilly will assume the role of Chief Cloud Architect and join the Citrix CTO Office.

For service providers, Citrix has moving ever-closer to being a one-stop shop when it comes to the tools necessary for building a cloud. But more than that, it could potentially mean that the Cloud.com domain name will be available soon. Someone might want to look into that.

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