Citrix scoops up Cloud.com

Service provider Citrix Systems has acquired upstart cloud software developer Cloud.com for undisclosed terms.

Cloud.com’s CloudStack product line is the basis for a range of simple, cost-effective cloud services that providers like Citrix can offer to businesses of all sizes.

 “We’ve worked with Citrix since before we went live,” said Peder Ulander, chief marketing officer of Cloud.com, which was founded in 2008. “A lot of the momentum for cloud services was coming from the service provider world.”

The Cloud.com product line will continue to be hypervisor-agnostic even as part of Citrix, Ulander said. “We’ll be a whole new product group within Citrix,” he said, rounding out the companies portfolio of cloud-focused platforms. The product line will continue to support leading commercial hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer and VMware vSphere, as well as open source hypervisors like Xen. Citrix intends to add support for Microsoft products like Hyper-V and System Center to the Cloud.com product line, as well as support a full range of platform-as-a-service development environments, storage systems, servers and management software.

Open-source computing will continue to be a focus, Ulander said, including ongoing Citrix support for OpenStack, which comprises 1100 cloud developers and 80 member companies.

Cloud.com CEO Sheng Liang will continue to lead the design, architecture and technology of the CloudStack product line, reporting to Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and general manager of the newly-formed Cloud Platforms product group at Citrix.