Citrix acquires Cloud.com

12 Jul 2011 Santa Clara - Citrix Systems has completed the acquisition of Cloud.com, a market leading provider of software infrastructure platforms for Cloud providers. The company's innovative CloudStack product line helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective Cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design. This acquisition further establishes Citrix as an expert in infrastructure for the rapidly growing Cloud provider market. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The transition from the PC Era to the Cloud Era is expected to fuel a massive build out in Cloud infrastructure, creating a new market projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2013, according to industry analysts. This market will feature thousands of providers of all shapes and sizes, offering a vast array of new Cloud services ranging from business, infrastructure and development offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. Most of the Clouds that service this market will look nothing like traditional enterprise data centres. They will run on radically different platforms purpose-built for Cloud computing - platforms designed from the ground up to deliver multi-tier, multi-tenant services in the simplest and most cost-effective way. The world's largest and most successful public Clouds are all built this way today.

The Cloud.com product line is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with Cloud management layered on top. It is a powerful, hypervisor-agnostic solution designed from the ground up to help providers build clouds the way the world's largest and most successful public Clouds are built - simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient. This proven approach has helped Cloud.com customers around the world roll out new Cloud services up to 50 times faster, at one fifth the cost of alternative solutions.

With the addition of Cloud.com, Citrix now offers a complete portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for the Cloud Era - solutions that are not only among the market leaders individually, but also designed to help customers avoid vendor lock-in by letting them use the hardware, software, management products and service providers of their choice.

A commitment to openness and interoperability has been a central pillar for both Citrix and Cloud.com, and will accelerate further with this acquisition. The Cloud.com product line will continue to support commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen. Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of "platform-as-a-service" development environments, storage systems, servers and management software.

A key part of this commitment to openness is a full embrace of open source as an essential element of Cloud computing. In addition to providing leadership in communities like Xen.org at the virtualization layer, this acquisition will help Citrix further accelerate its support of OpenStack, the popular open source Cloud infrastructure movement that now includes over 1,100 Cloud developers, and more than 80 member companies. As a founding member of Openstack.org, Citrix is the second largest contributor to the project and is a member of the OpenStack policy board.

Citrix product support for OpenStack was initially announced at the recent Citrix Synergy conference under the code name Project Olympus. With this acquisition, Citrix will also be extending OpenStack support to the Cloud.com product line in an upcoming release later this year.

With the addition of Cloud.com, the Citrix infrastructure portfolio for Cloud providers will include:

• Cloud Platform Products: CloudStack (new) - next generation, hypervisor-agnostic, Cloud infrastructure platform.
• XenServer: secure, cloud-optimized virtualization platform

Cloud networking products include:

• NetScaler Cloud Gateway: sits at the "front door" of corporate data centres giving IT an easy, unified way to orchestrate the delivery of any mix of SaaS, web and Windows apps to end users on any device.
• NetScaler Cloud Bridge: sits at the "back door" of corporate datacenters, giving IT unlimited capacity by seamlessly and securely extending any datacenter to any external Cloud service, regardless of hypervisor or platform.
• NetScaler SDX, MPX and VPX: powerful networking platforms designed from the ground up to serve as a "service delivery fabric" for virtual datacenters and Clouds.

App and desktop products include:

• XenApp and XenDesktop: market leading virtualization solutions that let Cloud providers deliver Windows apps and desktops as a service to any device.

The addition of Cloud.com brings Citrix an incredibly talented team that includes some of the world's most experienced Cloud computing experts. Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang will continue to lead the design, architecture and technology of the CloudStack product line, reporting to Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and general manager of the newly-formed Cloud Platforms product group at Citrix.

The Cloud.com CloudStack solution is available to cloud providers today, with Citrix branded versions coming in a future release.

Mark Templeton, President and CEO, Citrix Systems Inc., stated: “As the industry moves into the Cloud Era, Citrix is committed to leading the charge with powerful solutions that make the Cloud more open, more secure, and more personal. We are delighted to welcome the Cloud.com team to the Citrix family to focus our combined efforts on helping customers of all sizes make a difference in business, and in the lives of their customers and employees."

Sheng Liang, CEO and Founder, Cloud.com, stated: "Cloud.com is the platform behind many of the world's most innovative and successful clouds. Joining forces with Citrix will dramatically accelerate our mission to help customers achieve all the promise cloud computing has to offer, in a way that’s open, secure and efficient."

Jim Curry, GM of Cloud Builders, Rackspace, stated: "Citrix has been a leader in the creation of OpenStack, assembling an impressive team of developers and creating Project Olympus to take open Cloud-scale technology into the market. With the addition of the Cloud.com team, Citrix is furthering their commitment to OpenStack, ensuring that the OpenStack platform and APIs are even more widely available to customers everywhere."