I haven’t had time to review or weigh in on Citrix’s announcement on dropping support for OpenStack and embracing CloudStack. I know since the announcement OpenStack has had a couple of major wins but I don’t think they come close to offsetting the loss of Citrix in the camp.
Citrix really wants to compete in the datacenter with VMware. At the same time VMware is making a compelling argument for their Cloud ecosystem. If you are looking at rolling a private cloud and you already have a vSphere infrastructure it’s difficult to weed through all the commercial options and the basically non-existent open source options for a VMWare environment. vCloud becomes the defacto option when you don’t have months to research alternatives. This puts Citrix at a handicap when it comes to competing in the data center and the private cloud.
I believe the Citrix move is positioned to help those who haven’t already invested heavily into VMware and are considering both a virtualization and cloud strategy a compelling option. I commented earlier on the progress of the OpenStack platform and how far they have to go. Citrix can’t afford to wait on the platform to mature.
If Citrix executes well they will have a great story to tell customers about potential seamless integration with AWS. I think Citrix looks at Amazon more of a partner than VMware does. The ability to provide surge capability of your XenServer based private cloud to AWS is enticing.
