Market Leading Cloud.com Platform Lets Customers Build Clouds the Way the World’s Most Successful Clouds Are Built
SANTA CLARA, Calif.: Citrix Systems today announced it 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 a leader 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 analystsi. 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 datacenters. 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 solutionsii.
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.
Citrix Commitment to Openness
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 leading 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.
Citrix Cloud Infrastructure Portfolio
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:
- NetScaler® Cloud Gateway – sits at the “front door” of corporate datacenters 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:
- XenApp™ and XenDesktop® – market leading virtualization solutions that let cloud providers deliver Windows apps and desktops as a service to any device.
Citrix Cloud Platforms Product Group
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.
Product Availability
The Cloud.com CloudStack solution is available to cloud providers today, with Citrix branded versions coming in a future release.