Citrix Acquires Cloud.com, Adding to Its OpenStack-focused Cloud Plays
Stepping up what is already fierce competition in the race to provide cloud computing platform infrastructure, Citrix Systems announced that it has completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. As GigaOM notes, in addition to putting Citrix in closer competition with VMware and other cloud computing players, Cloud.com also has many notable customers who favor its cloud stack infrastructure, which is centered on OpenStack, including GoDaddy and Zynga. Cloud.com is only three years old, and while the terms of the deal were not disclosed, various reports online put the purchase price at between $250 million and $500 million.
According to Citrix's announcement:
"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."
The "hypervisor agnostic" part of Cloud.com's focus, as well what the company adds to Citrix's portfolio of cloud-centric offerings are important. According to the company's announcement: "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."
Recently, we covered how Citrix has announced a new, commercial cloud platform called Project Olympus, which is based on OpenStack. According to the announcement: Project Olympus is "a groundbreaking new cloud infrastructure product based on the popular OpenStack project. By leveraging OpenStack, Project Olympus purportedly inherits the collective experience and innovation of hundreds of experienced open source cloud developers – and a rapidly growing list of more than 60 supporting commercial hardware and software vendors.
The bottom line is that Citrix is pursuing open, flexible platforms for business and organizations that want to deploy cloud applications without incurring vendor lock-in. Citrix is a founding member of OpenStack.org, and its growing array of open and flexible cloud stack components will give players such as VMware a run for their money.
Cloud.com is a noted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider in the cloud, a component that was missing from Citrix's cloud portfolio. Its platform is completely hypervisor-agnostic. Meanwhile, many cloud-based products and services from VMware remain proprietary.