Citrix Systems has acquired cloud.com in a deal which will boost its position in the cloud computing market. The deal also underscores the growing role of open source software in building and deploying cloud platforms. Cloud.com provides open source software to create cloud computing platforms for services providers, providing Citrix with an infrastructure as a service (laaS) offering in addition to its Xenserver hypervisor. Cloud.com also provides the back and end for cloud platforms for about 45 companies, including hosting giant GoDaddy and game developer Zynga.

Citrix Systems itself is a leading provider of virtual computing solutions that help people work and play from anywhere, on any device.  More than 230,000 enterprises rely on Citrix to create better ways for people, IT and business to work through virtual meetings, desktops and data centers.  Citrix virtualization, networking and cloud solutions deliver over 100 million corporate desktops and touch 75 percent of Internet users each day. Citrix partners with over 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2010 was $1.87 billion.

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.

The acquisition adds Cloud.com’s CloudStack product line to the Citrix cloud infrastructure portfolio, which also includes Citrix’s cloud-optimized virtualization platform, XenServer. 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.

After its acquisition in July, Cloud.com’s CloudStack cloud management framework is being open-sourced. The software currently supports over 60-large scale production clouds, including those run by GoDaddy, GreenQloud, KT, Nokia, Tata Communications and Zynga. With the release, CloudStack has also added support for additional hypervisors and support for bare metal provisioning.

In addition, with the launch of CloudStack 2.2.10 this week at the VMworld 2011 conference in Las Vegas (which we will have four days of live event coverage from VMWorld Live via #theCUBE), the framework now supports VMware’s newly launched ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and Oracle’s VM 2.X variants of the Xen hypervisor, to complement the range of VMware, KVM and Xen hypervisors it already supports. Support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V will arrive later this year. And as before with CloudStack, customers can mix and match multiple hypervisors, both proprietary and open source, and use them in a highly available cloud computing instance.