Virtualisation and cloud software player Citrix has acquired cloud infrastructure firm Cloud.com, makers of the CloudStack product line for a figure believed to be between US$200m and US$250m.
The move will give Citrix a considerable edge in the burgeoning US$11bn cloud computing market. The particular area of value for Citrix is ownership over infrastructure that defines how different types of clouds are built.
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 US$11bn by the end of 2013, according to industry analysts.
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 data centres. They will run on radically different platforms purpose built for cloud computing – platforms designed from the ground.
Hypervisor-agnostic platform
Cloud.com’s platform is a 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 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 solutions.
The Cloud.com product line will continue to support 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.
Citrix said the acquisition will help accelerate its support of OpenStack, the popular open-source cloud infrastructure movement that now includes more than 1,100 cloud developers, and more than 80 member companies.
