Citrix has just announced their acquisition of Cloud.com, one of the leading cloud-computing providers for public and private cloud infrastructures.  Cloud.com is known for providing services to Nokia, GoDaddy and Zynga.  This may be the most important acquisition that Citrix has made in recent months, especially with the dawning of the cloud era.

“Cloud.com is the platform behind many of the world’s most innovative and successful clouds,” said Sheng Liang, CEO and Founder, Cloud.com. “Joining forces with Citrix will dramatically accelerate our mission to help customers achieve all the promise cloud computing has to offer, in a way that’s open, secure and efficient.”

This acquisition will have a major impact on the market, especially for OpenStack, which is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds, which both Citrix and Cloud.com is a part of.

Cloud.com’s CloudStack software lets programs automatically draw on separate computing and storage devices to do their work. The software can be half to one-tenth as expensive to run as VMware’s and Microsoft’s cloud-computing products, said James Staten, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc.

“If you build your cloud on VMware or Microsoft, you’re sharing your profits with those guys,” Staten said.

Sameer Dholakia, GM of Citrix’s new Cloud Platforms product group stated that they will stay committed to OpenStack despite the acquisition.  He stated that they are just “doubling down” on OpenStack.

Doubling down or not, this acquisition will move them to the top in terms of cloud-computing which in turn will also be profitable for current and future investors.  With this deal Citrix becomes more competitive in the infrastructure arena, facing industry giants like VMware for a competitive, full-service offering to clients.

And whenever Citrix is mentioned, VMWare is not far behind. Both have had recent acquisitions, VMware’s latest was an effort to support their VDI Strategy.  But in terms of cloud, Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix System’s Data Center and Cloud Division stated in an interview with theCube that VMWare cannot offer a stack capable of building a mega-cloud which consists of 10,000 servers.  And that’s where Citrix looks to differentiate itself.


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