Citrix Eschews Cloud Server Business, But CloudStack is Just Fine

Citrix made some very big changes in the past few years.It announced in November that it would spin off its GoToMeeting and related products into an independent publicly traded company. And back in 2012, it contributed its CloudStack open source cloud computing platform to the Apache Software Foundation.

Now, further distancing the company from its CloudStack efforts, Citrix announced that it has sold its two cloud infrastructure management platforms: CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager, both of which are based on CloudStack.

The company is selling the cloud platforms to Accelerite, a subsidiary of Persistent Systems. Accelerite specializes on cloud backup and recovery as a service.

According to a Citrix advisory:

"We at Citrix are extremely confident that Accelerite will help nurture our customers, who are heavily invested in running their public, commercial clouds on these solutions and will allow Citrix to focus on our core priorities around the secure delivery of apps and data. Accelerite has been successful in acquiring numerous product lines from other large companies, such as HP, Intel and Openwave, to grow cloud computing and virtualization software products." 

This news is probably good for users of CloudStack and related cloud tools. Citrix says that it will work closely with Accelerite to build on CloudPlatform integrations with XenServer, NetScaler and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

In addition, the Apache Software Foundation has proven to be a good steward of CloudStack and other cloud tools.  And, as we've noted, CloudStack may have a very bright future in China. Still, it is very clear now that Citrix does not want to be in the cloud server business.