Citrix swallows OpenStack ally Cloud.com Citrix Systems has purchased Silicon Valley startup Cloud.com as part of its effort to help customers build, deploy, and manage Amazon-style "infrastructure clouds". On Tuesday, Citrix announced the purchase of the three-year-old, 50-person, venture-funded startup for an undisclosed sum. The deal is believed to be worth $500m …
The acquisition might be great news for Cloud.com, but there is a real danger of it slowing down the emergence of public cloud services and limiting the options of cloud customers. Despite the cloud explosion in the media, even today there are only 500 public cloud service providers in the world. Compared to the 33,000 hosting companies worldwide, it’s a very small percentage that can actually put public cloud services in the hands of customers. With Citrix and CA Technologies calling the shots over who makes it as a cloud service provider, we may start to see a squeeze on the speed of delivery of cloud services which will fall behind customer demand. Smaller hosting companies will actually be the biggest driver of public cloud provisioning, but they won’t necessarily meet the revenue or scale requirements of the newly consolidated big boys to get access to the software they need to start offering cloud services. Ultimately users will be forced to buy in a constrained market, which could trigger a rise in pricing, further delaying the advance of the public cloud.
The Register 
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