Citrix has acquired infrastructure management specialist Cloud.com, a company that specialises in data transfers between end-user client computers and public clouds.
Read this
Citrix: Why hypervisor dominance matters
As Microsoft, Google and Amazon jostle for control of the public cloud, Citrix chief technology officer Simon Crosby talks about AWS's prominence, hypervisors and the threat of VMware dominance
The acquisition will allow Citrix to offer a platform for public clouds that securely links into its pre-existing NetScaler Cloud Gateway and Cloud Bridge products, the company indicated on Tuesday. This means data can be securely transferred from public clouds, down to private clouds and into end-user clients using complementary Citrix technologies.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Cloud.com's main product is the open-source CloudStack technology, which creates virtual infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public or private clouds similar to Amazon Web Services. CloudStack can be used for free or as part of a commercial deal.
According to Cloud.com, existing customers of its technology include social games specialist Zynga, Tata Communications and the Nokia Research Centre.
Citrix will use the acquisition to enhance the work it does on the OpenStack open-source cloud platform, of which it, Cloud.com and more than 60 other companies are members. Citrix will also continue to add to Project Olympus, which is a combination of the OpenStack cloud with Citrix XenServer.
With the acquisition, Citrix also plans to offer education services relating to cloud technologies. There will be a free 90-minute series of webinars, along with a two-day technical workshop to show people how to build clouds and what technologies to use.
Many of Cloud.com's senior technical people will join Citrix, including chief executive Sheng Liang, Citrix said in a statement. At the time of writing, ZDNet UK could not establish if there would be Cloud.com job cuts as a result of the acquisition.
Get the latest technology news and analysis, blogs and reviews delivered directly to your inbox with ZDNet UK's newsletters.
Talkback
This post has been removed by a moderator.
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. Source: http://cloudtechsite.com/news/citrix-swigs-open-stack-ally-cloud-com.html
This post has been removed by a moderator.