Citrix buys cloud management vendor Cloud.com
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Infrastructure software vendor picks up open source, "hypervisor-agnostic" cloud management provider
Citrix has bolstered its ability to support customers building public or private cloud systems by acquiring a start-up named Cloud.com for an undisclosed amount.
Cloud.com, formerly known as VMOps, sells an open source, "hypervisor agnostic" virtual infrastructure management system named CloudStack, which it says helps organisations build scalable cloud environments, whether public-facing or for internal, private use.
The company is a logical fit for Citrix, whose server virtualisation software XenSource is based on the open source hypervisor Xen. It reestablishes Citrix as a player in server virtualisation, having been replaced as the alternative to VMware by Microsoft.
In a statement, Citrix said the Cloud.com product line would remain open source and would continue to support hypervisor software from both VMware and Microsoft. Both will continue to support cloud open standards initiative OpenStack.
The acquisition might be great news for Cloud.com, but there is a real danger of it slowing down the emergence of public cloud services and limiting the options of cloud customers. Despite the cloud explosion in the media, even today there are only 500 public cloud service providers in the world. Compared to the 33,000 hosting companies worldwide, it’s a very small percentage that can actually put public cloud services in the hands of customers. With Citrix and CA Technologies calling the shots over who makes it as a cloud service provider, we may start to see a squeeze on the speed of delivery of cloud services which will fall behind customer demand. Smaller hosting companies will actually be the biggest driver of public cloud provisioning, but they won’t necessarily meet the revenue or scale requirements of the newly consolidated big boys to get access to the software they need to start offering cloud services. Ultimately users will be forced to buy in a constrained market, which could trigger a rise in pricing, further delaying the advance of the public cloud.
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