Citrix Open Sources Cloud.Com Tools, Accelerates in Infrastructure Battle

Stepping up what is already fierce competition in the race to provide cloud computing platform infrastructure, Citrix Systems announced in July that it has completed the acquisition of Cloud.com. As we've noted, the move puts 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. Now, Citrix is open sourcing the code that drives Cloud.com.

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 key to Citrix's announcement was that Cloud.com is "hypervisor agnostic." People want to deploy virtualization in conjunction with cloud applications, running multiple platforms. Companies using Cloud.com run VMware for virtualization, and they run KVM and Xen hypervisors. 

At this week's VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Citrix is showing CloudStack 2.2.10, and emphasizing an open approach. As The Register notes, Citrix is emerging as a close competitor to VMware, Eucalyptus Systems and many other players. The company has also proceeded with its Project Olympus, a cloud infrastructure project based on OpenStack. 

It's interesting to see open source playing such a critical role in the cloud infrastructure battles. Many organizations want to deploy customized, private and public cloud applications, and want open, flexible platforms. Just in the past couple of months, Citrix has rapidly accelerated as a competitor in this race.