Citrix is acquiring Cloud.com in a play to be the open cloud provider of choice for the enterprise and consumer services markets.

The acquisition puts Citrix square in the middle of the market for providing open, infrastructure services in the same style as Amazon Web Services (AWS). This is in contrast to high-end infrastructures that companies such as IBM and VMware are building .

Cloud.com offers a secure, multi-tenant stack. It is built on an open hypervisor for massive scale and end user access. Virtualization technologies such as Xen, VMware and KVM all run on Cloud.com’s agnostic hypervisor environment.

The acquisition will have considerable impact on the market, specifically driving up the importance of Open Stack, the open coud infrastructure effort, which Citrix and Cloud.com are major contributors.

OpenStack is built on Rackspace storage and NASA’s compute power. It is designed to help organizations to build their own cloud services.

By providing a commodity infrastructure, OpenStack paves the way for companies such as Citrix to work with a multitude of service providers. These service providers form the foundation for a rich ecosystem, similar to what AWS has provided for the market.

AWS has thousands of developers using its infrastructure. By creating its ecosystem, AWS has attracted a large community of service providers such as Accenture, which help enterprises develop cloud infrastructures.

But AWS has been criticized for not being secure enough. In contrast, Citrix sees security  as a central theme. Cloud. com plays into that focus.

Cloud.com is growing by providing a services infrastructure for such telecommunications providers such as Korea Telecom (KT), which rebuilt its infrastructure on the Cloud.com platform. Working with other services providers, Cloud.com helped build a new commodity infrastructure that now serves developers, service providers and businesses that are using KT for application development and other use cases.

Citrix realizes that there is still a lot of education to be done. It will be offering a series of 90 minute workshops and black belt training classes to help educate people about what it offers and the distinctions between it and high end providers.

Services Angle

This is a big deal. In particular, its an endorsement for an open services environment, an ecosystem that has huge upside for providers. There’s a huge opportunity in OpenStack. Citrix is showing its leadership there and further defining itself as an alternative to the multitude of private cloud providers in the market.