Citrix buys Cloud.com

Citrix buys Cloud.com to challenge rivals 

Citrix Systems Inc, a maker of computer-networking software, agreed to buy startup Cloud.com for an undisclosed price, gaining software that helps businesses shift more computing tasks to data centers. The acquisition will let Citrix customers run cloud-computing software faster and more cheaply, Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Citrix said on Wednesday. The deal propels Citrix into cloud- infrastr ucture software. The acquisition puts Citrix into closer competition with VMware Inc and Amazon.com, companies with different approaches to cloud computing. 

VMware reveals cloud computing strategy

VMware made a handful of product announcements on Tuesday that add up to the company’s bid to become the Microsoft of cloud computing. 

    VMware, of course, is the leader in data center job-juggling technology called virtualization. This software not only makes data center computing more efficient — less hardware, lower energy costs — but it is a vital building block in the plumbing behind cloud computing. 
    VMware announced enhancements in its virtualization engine, vSphere 5. But the company also introduced what it is calling its “cloud infrastructure suite,” addressing issues like security, back-up recovery and automated deployment of processing and storage in cloud computing environments. 
    Paul Maritz, chief executive of VMware, compared its move in the cloud to Microsoft’s introduction of a bundle of personal computer productivity programs for white-collar workers in the 1990s: Microsoft Office. The word processing, spreadsheet and presentation programs all worked smoothly together, and ran on Microsoft’s underlying technology platform, the Windows operating system. 
    “We’re doing the same thing for automated cloud infrastructures,” Maritz said in an interview. 
    Convenient for customers, no doubt. But it seems there is a larger issue. Aren’t the broad-based cloud software suppliers, like VMware, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle, really just offering another form of technology lock-in? Calling something “cloud” doesn’t make it any less proprietary. 
    Maritz, who spent 14 years at Microsoft in the good years (he left in 2000), has an answer. He says that most companies want the underlying cloud infrastructure to just work, implying that VMware’s offerings work best. “In some sense, that layer becomes the new hardware,” he said. 
    But at a higher level — the business applications that run in cloud settings — you need mobility, Maritz said. “You want your applications to be portable,” he noted. 
    With VMware, Maritz said, that path to portability is Cloud Foundry, a VMware hosted and managed service. It has an related open-source project for developing tools for portability, CloudFoundry.org. 
    “You don’t want these clouds to become the modern equivalent of the mainframe,” Maritz explained. NYT NEWS SERVICE