If Citrix is on a buying spree – should its next purchase be Virtual Computer?

Like a new college student, fresh from the flush of new found freedom to expand their horizons, Citrix appear to have had a case of the munchies. First Citrix’s portfolio was extended with the acquitisition of Kaviza. More recently, the purchase of RingCube. The desktop virtualisation techhnologies acquired will help strengthen Citrix’s virtualised desktop offering. VDI-in-a-box offering simplicity of deployment, providing options for the SMB and MSP spaces; and vDesk providing a layering functionality giving greater VDI scalability with an improved personalisation offering.

Cisco, Intel, and Citrix Re-invent OpenStack Networking for the Enterprise

Over the last few months an additional subproject codenamed Quantum has emerged which deals explicitly with networking and has particpation from networking giants Intel and Cisco as well as from Citrix. It’s a mechanism for defining network topologies aimed at providing Layer-2 network connectivity for VM instances running in clouds based on the OpenStack cloud fabric. It is designed to be extensible to allow higher-level services (VPN, QoS, etc) to be built on top, and to cleanly handle the “edge of network” problem (i.e. the binding of the cloud into the internet).

News: Citrix Acquires Cloud.com

Citrix has purchased Cloud.com and this poses some interesting changes to the overall virtualization and cloud markets. One also has to wonder about the timing of the announcement to coincide with the same day as the big announcements coming out of VMware. I see this purchase as a mixed blessing to the market place, but also a renewal for Citrix.

Xen Founders Leave Citrix to Tackle Cloud Security Woes

At Citrix Synergy 2011 in San Francisco last month Simon Crosby made the case that the biggest barrier to the adoption of service-provider offered cloud services is the understandable lack of trust on the part of enterprise customers. Well it looks as if he and fellow Xen luminary Ian Pratt have decided to do something about that lack of trust and are moving on from Citrix to address the problem at its source. Ian and Simon announced today that they are both leaving Citrix and taking key roles along with with Gaurav Banga (the creator of Phoenix Hyperspace) as co-founders of cloud security start-up Bromium.

Citrix announces IaaS Project Olympus built on OpenStack

One of the most intriguing names that has hitherto been at the periphery of the OpenStack initiative is Citrix. Up until last week, Citrix’s contribution was to ensure OpenStack ran on XenServer. However, this week at it’s Synergy event, Citrix made some more sigificant announcements about Project Olympus, through which it aims to provide (in collaboration with Dell and Rackspace) a route to commercial exploitation of the OpenStack codebase. For some time I have been perplexed as to what Citrix is doing. Are they genuinely intending to enter this space? Is this the real play or is it a spoiler?