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.

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?

Citrix Reach Out for the SME market with Kaviza Aquisition

Kaviza developers one of the first all-in-one “VDI-in-a-Box” solutions for small and medium business, have been acquired by Citrix. The acquisition adds a fast-track VDI-only solution to the Citrix portfolio geared at the SME/SMB market. The Kaviza “VDI-in-a-Box” product is billed as complementing the Citrix’s XenDesktop product line for enterprise-class desktop virtualization.

Desktone 3.0 the $1 virtual desktop

One week after Austin, TX-based Virtual Bridges Inc. announced that IBM is using its flagship VERDE solution to provide virtual desktop management and provisioning capabilities for the IBM Cloud Service Provider Platform, Chelmsford MA based Desktone Inc. today announced two major steps forward on the road to ubiquitous public cloud-based virtual desktops – The release of Desktone 3.0, and its partnership with Rackspace Hosting to provide public cloud-based virtual desktops for just $1 per day.

Rackspace Hijacks OpenStack

Rackspace has got the OpenStack governance model spectacularly wrong, and as a result the whole initiative is in peril. Not only are the Chair and the Chief Architect appointed directly by Rackspace, but 3 additional members are appointed directly by Rackspace, meaning that the 4 independently-elected Community members (even if they could agree) could never form a majority. There is actually no need to gain control explicitly. You control by contribution. Since Rackspace contributes most it will gain most control. Rackspace doesn’t actually need control to satisfy its business objectives. ll it needs is to make sure the project is successful and retain enough control over the project to ensure its own needs are met. So our suggestion to OpenStack is to take their Governance model, rip it up and start again.