Citrix Acquires Cloud.com

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Citrix (NASDQ:CTXS) is acquiring cloud startup cloud.com in an effort to further expand cloud services and ramp up competition against VMware.

Cloud.com offers a Platform-as-a-Service solution that is intended to help make it easier for enterprises to manage and deploy cloud services. Citrix spokesperson Julie Geer told InternetNews.com that Citrix was not disclosing the financial value of the deal. That said, she noted that all of Cloud.com’s employees will be moving over to Citrix. The cloud.com product portfolio will now be branded as Citrix CloudStack under the new Cloud Platforms Group headed up by Sameer Dholakia.

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“We view this acquisition as being very strategic and it will be accelerating what we’re doing in the cloud infrastructure marketplace,” Sameer Dholakia, GM, Citrix Cloud Platforms product group said during a conference call with press and analysts. “While there is much hype around the phrase of ‘cloud’, it is certainly more than hype. This is not a fad, it’s a transformative trend in IT that is fundamentally changing the way that IT infrastructure is designed, built, delivered and consumed.”

Cloud.com executive Peter Ulander, who is joining Citrix as VP of Product Marketing with the Cloud Platforms product group, noted that there is a fit between the companies.

“We really view ourselves as an orchestration and administration tool and we’ll continue with that plan inside of Citrix,” Ulander said. “We’re hypervisor agnostic, building on top of the foundations that clouds are built on today.”

Ulander added that the cloud.com technology will continue to optimize their solution around open source and open standards-based solutions. Citrix is a key backer of the open source OpenStack platform and that’s a direction that cloud.com is now headed toward as well. Ulander noted that the cloud.com team is committed to delivering OpenStack API’s on top of their cloud stack as well as implementing OpenStack storage support.

Earlier this year, Citrix announced Project Olympus as its OpenStack-based approach for delivering a cloud Platform-as-a-Service. Dholakia said that Citrix remains committed to Project Olympus even as it pushes forward with cloud.com.

“We view the acquisition of cloud.com as a doubling down on OpenStack,” Dholakia said. “We’ll be doing a number of things so that organizations that build on cloudstack have the opportunity to grow in the future with OpenStack.”

In Dholakia’s view, the overall Citrix solution will be a competitive choice in the marketplace against VMware.

“We believe that we’ll get a pretty exciting solution out to the marketplace that will very much be the open alternative to vCloud,” Dholakia said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.