This morning Citrix announced its acquisition of Cloud.com, a company that sells virtualization infrastructure for building private clouds. Cloud.com brings with it a number of high profile customers such as Bechtel, GoDaddy, Tata Communications and Zynga.
The announcement follows Citrix’s announcement of its private cloud infrastructure play called Project Olympus, which is based on OpenStack. Citrix will continue to support OpenStack and will integrate Cloud.com’s technology into its offerings.
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“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,” says Citrix’s announcement. “As a founding member of Openstack.org, Citrix is the second largest contributor to the project and is a member of the OpenStack policy board.”
Although the biggest consolidation trend we’ve seen this year is in telecommunications companies buying up public infrastructure-as-a-service providers, much of the interest in the cloud is in building private clouds. Citrix, VMware and Rackspace have all been upping their game in the private cloud area, and this purchase falls right in line with that trend.
Analyst Krishnan Subramanian writes that the deal could help Citrix take a lead over VMware in the cloud infrastructure segment, though he admits that it is far-fetched. However, Subramanian believes this acquisition is could be a big boost for OpenStack and lead to an open source monopoly in the cloud infrastructure space.
“Since the new Citrix CloudStack is going to have OpenStack at the core with Cloud.com’s platform playing a role at the Orchestration layer, we are essentially going to see a two pronged cloud strategy with their own cloud push and, also, as a major player in the OpenStack ecosystem,” Subramanian writes.
This acquisition is particularly bad news for Eucalyptus, which, as Subramanian notes, was once the hottest startup in this space. However, Eucalyptus could now be a startup target for other larger companies looking to challenge companies like Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.
Financial details were not disclosed, but TechCrunch and GigaOM report that the deal was in the $200 to 250 million range. Cloud.com is said to have raised as much as $20 million from investors such as Redpoint Ventures, Nexus Capital and Index Ventures.
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