They’ve made a few acquisitions, but I wouldn’t have pegged Citrix as the likely contender to buy XenSource, the open source virtualization specialist. In fact, I didn’t see XenSource as being up for sale at all. Now it gets interesting.
When I attended Novell’s BrainShare conference two years ago, the company was all over Xen as its hypervisor of choice, and Red Hat was quick to follow suit. How will Citirix, with little experience in open source, manage this kind of thing successfully?
In another sense, though, the buyout makes sense. Citrix is best known for Presentation Server, which connects remote applications to central servers. More recently it’s been buying its way into load balancing and applicaiton acceleration. That would seem to go hand in hand with the increased utilization and capacity management benefits that are supposed to come through virtualization. Is VMware worried? Probably not, but if they weren’t already a part of EMC they would surely look less well-rounded than they do now. This should make for some worthy competition in the infrastructure space.
