TechCrunch reported today that Citrix has acquired Cloud.com for > $200m.  This is a great exit for a very talented team at Cloud.com and I’m not surprised at their success.  Cloud.com has had great success in the market, especially in the last 12 months.  This is both in the service provider space and for internal private clouds.  Great technology, solid execution.

Citrix has been a fairly active member in the OpenStack community, most recently with their Olympus Project announcement in May.  The stated goal there is…

a tested and verified distribution of … OpenStack, combined with a cloud-optimized version of XenServer.

Cloud.com has also been visible in OpenStack though there has not been a lot of detail on their commitment. Cloud.com’s CloudStack is also a multi-hypervisor solution with support for vSphere and KVM in addition to XenServer. I would assume that to continue to be the case – selling in the enterprise means bowing to the reality of a VMware dominant position. However, I would expect an ever-tighter value prop with XenServer and that’s okay.

So will Citrix clarify the Cloud.com/OpenStack position?  That’s almost a given and in-fact I do expect a strong push to dominate commercial OpenStack based on the feature/function lead that Cloud.com gives them.  Given the support for other hypervisors, this does put more pressure on Piston as a startup targeting the OpenStack space.  However, the Piston team is very smart (led by Joshua McKenty) and I would not worry about them just yet.

No matter what happens from here, it has to be a great day for the Cloud.com team.  Savor it and enjoy – and then get back to work!