Citrix Acquires Cloud.com, Boosts Cloud Footprint

The financial details of the Cloud.com acquisition were not released. According to Citrix, Cloud.com's team will join Citrix and be wrapped into the company's new Cloud Platforms Product Group, which will be headed by Citrix General Manager Sameer Dholakia.

Dholakia said the addition of Cloud.com, which was founded in 2008 and makes the CloudStack open-source cloud computing platform for building and managing private and public cloud infrastructure, helps Citrix target the transition from the PC era to the cloud era and expand beyond its Xen and NetScaler plays.

"[Cloud] is not a fad," he said. "It's a transformative trend in IT that is changing the way that IT is designed, built and consumed."

Peter Ulander, Cloud.com's CMO, now vice president of product marketing in Citrix's Cloud Platforms Product Group, said the Cloud.com acquisition gives Citrix a hypervisor agnostic -- XenServer, KVM, Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, scalable cloud infrastructure play that can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted service to give enterprise clouds a more Amazon-esque feel.

Cloud.com and Citrix will also continue their allegiance to and participation in the Rackspace-led OpenStack open-source cloud project; both companies are contributing members. In May, Citrix unveiled Project Olympus, an open-source cloud infrastructure based on Citrix XenServer and OpenStack.

Ulander said within Citrix's cloud ecosystem, CloudStack will act as the orchestration layer.

Dholakia said wrapping in Cloud.com will give Citrix the tools needed to connect and build all types of clouds, from personal clouds to private clouds to public clouds. The product set will include the NetScaler Cloud Gateway, the "front door" for cloud and enterprise applications; NetScaler Cloud Bridge, the "back door" for capacity; and CloudStack, which is a platform on which to build Amazon-like clouds, Dholakia said.

The Cloud.com acquisition is the most recent step in Citrix's cloud computing strategy, which also recently saw the company invest in other cloud up-and-comers like cloud mobilization player, Core Mobile Networks; cloud platform for content-based analysis of video and other digital media, Graymatics; and Visual WebGUI web, cloud and mobile delivery platform maker, Gizmox.

Cloud.com also makes another cloud-focused acquisition for Citrix. Earlier this year Citrix acquired cloud app delivery offering EMS-Cortex. That followed Citrix's acquisition of Netviewer AG, a privately held European SaaS collaboration and IT services player. And last August, Citrix acquired cloud virtualization management vendor VMLogix, which offers management for public and private clouds and will be used to bulk up Citrix's OpenCloud infrastructure platform for cloud computing providers.