Citrix acquires Cloud.com- will it be enough?

Citrix will acquire platform startup Cloud.com to bolster its private cloud product line.

Cloud.com is a three year old software startup that makes a cloud computing platform: management and messaging software to turn a commodity hardware stack of servers and virtualization into a cloud platform, like Amazon Web Services. Citrix will be integrating Cloud.com into its cloud product lineup, which is basically VDI, GoToWhatever and unicorn snot at the moment.

The Cupertino-based ex-startup is one of the more mature cloud platform gambits, like Eucalyptus. It was already a Citrix partner and has a string of decent names in its badge collection; online game giant Zygna is a customer, currently in the process of building out it’s own personal cloud after living on AWS for some time; it’s using Cloud.com’s CloudStack in both cases, a telling example of the software’s versatility.

The deal is a nice exit for Cloud.com, founded by virtualization veteran Sheng Liang; it was rapidly able to collect and deliver on big customers and apparently the platform is solid, technologically. But it’s a bigger deal for Citrix, which has been, if not exactly sinking under the waves, not making a great deal of progress.

Now it has a valid, honest to goodness cloud stack to offer users that’s compatible to a T with Citrix’s Xen hypervisor and the crowd-pleasing OpenStack project. Cloud.com has said it is merging its code base for CloudStack with OpenStack, so Cirtix gets a double whammy with this buy. This won’t rock the cloud boat all that much; mostly it means Citrix isn’t doomed to being adonut spare fifth wheel on the HP, IBM, Microsoft and EMC/Cisco/VMware cloud wagon.