Citrix this morning announced that it has acquired Cloud.com, a provider of software infrastructure platforms for cloud providers. The company’s CloudStack product line helps providers of all types deploy and manage simple, cost-effective cloud services that are scalable, secure, and open by design.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but TechCrunch reports that Citrix paid more than $200 million for the cloud computing startup.
Also read: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com: An Analysis from CloudAve
Industry analysts expect a massive build out in cloud infrastructure, creating a new market projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2013.
The Cloud.com product line is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud management layered on top. It 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.
With the addition of Cloud.com, Citrix now offers a complete portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions purpose built for what it dubs the ‘Cloud Era’. The Cloud.com product line will continue to support 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.
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.
Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang will continue to lead the design, architecture and technology of the CloudStack product line, reporting to Sameer Dholakia, group VP and GM of the newly-formed Cloud Platforms product group at Citrix.
The Cloud.com CloudStack solution is available to cloud providers today, with Citrix branded versions coming in a future release.
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.