Citrix's CloudStack Cloud Platform Is No Also-Ran

It's been six months since Citrix contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation. Back in February of this year, we covered Citrix's announcement of the CloudStack 3 open source cloud platform, and the company has put a lot of focus on its cloud strategy since then. In a new blog post with the hashtag "#winning" attached to it. Citrix has provided an update on where CloudStack stands. "CloudStack has also won the support of major vendors including Cisco, CA and NetApp, all of whom announced significant investments in the platform this week at Citrix Synergy in Barcelona," the post reports.

According to Citrix's post:

"CloudStack continues to gain rapid adoption with large scale deployments around the world, both with major service provider and enterprise customers. While you might not realize it from reading the press releases, CloudStack is far and away the most widely deployed open source platform in the cloud. It’s not even a close race. While other platforms have lots of 'PR wins,' very few have been successful in real deployments."

Do you think Citrix might be referring to OpenStack when it comes to the PR wins? It seems so.

As Barb Darrow notes on GigaOM, CloudStack is striking back in the cloud computing race, despite so much attention given to OpenStack. She writes:

"CloudStack is more mature than OpenStack and got early traction among service providers. Citrix says that 500 CloudStack-based clouds come online each month...OpenStack, which is entering its third year,  has just transitioned from a Rackspace-led effort to a more multi-vendor-focused foundation." 

Indeed, much of the attention given to OpenStack comes from the long list of heavyweight tech vendors backing the platform. According to Citrix, good things lie ahead for CloudStack:

"CloudPlatform, the Citrix product based on CloudStack, now powers the public, private or hybrid cloud strategies of more than 130 organizations around the globe. Many of the world’s leading telecom companies have chosen CloudPlatform as the foundation for their next-generation cloud computing offerings, including BT, China Telecom, EVRY, IDCFrontier, KDDI, KT, NTT Communications, Orange MBS and Slovak Telecom."

As we noted months ago, CloudStack is driven forward as a pure open source platform by Apache, while Citrix positions CloudPlatform as its commercial play. It sounds like CloudPlatform is doing very well, and you can find out many more surprising details about CloudStack's momentum in the Citrix update.