Citrix Unveils Next Phase of CloudStack Strategy

Citrix today unveiled the next phase of its strategy to accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing. As a key part of this strategy, the company’s popular CloudStack™ solution will become the first cloud platform in the industry to be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. Elevating CloudStack into a full open source Apache project will further accelerate its mission of delivering a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds. CloudStack brings to Apache more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. To capitalize on this market momentum, Citrix will also deliver a commercially supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution as the centerpiece of its cloud infrastructure product portfolio.

The transition to the Cloud Era is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed $11 billion by the end of 2014¹. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and "Proven Amazon Compatible.”

Open Source in the Cloud Era

Unlike previous generations of computing, the Cloud Era is being fueled in large part by open source technology that was first proven at scale in large production clouds, then made available to customers of all sizes under open source licenses. The Apache Software Foundation is leading the way with highly successful projects like Hadoop, Hive and Cassandra that were initially developed in large, successful clouds like Facebook and Yahoo!, then released for broader use under the Apache License. This proven method for incubating and advancing leading open source cloud projects is ideal for bringing a vibrant community of vendors and developers together to accelerate innovation, interoperability and standardization. As the first step in this strategy, Citrix CloudStack 3 will be released today under Apache License 2.0, and the CloudStack.org community will become part of the highly successful Apache Incubator program. Citrix will further support the project with a significantly increased investment in engineering, community support and marketing. (See separate Citrix announcement today: CloudStack Citrix to Become a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation)

More to Come At Citrix Synergy 2012

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton and GM of Cloud Platforms, Sameer Dholakia, will discuss today’s announcement and unveil further details about the company’s broader cloud strategy at the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2012 conference May 9-11 in San Francisco. Citrix will also sponsor two CloudStack Design Summits within the year, bringing together a broad range of partners, developers and users to engage, learn and collaborate on the newly launched project.

Broad Ecosystem Support

In addition to more than 100 successful production deployments, CloudStack has been verified to work with more than 2,200 products and services across the industry as part of the Citrix Ready Cloud Community Program - building on a rich tradition of interoperability that is immediately inherited by the proposed Apache CloudStack project. In addition, Citrix was joined in today’s announcement by more than 50 independent software vendors, providers and technology partners demonstrating their support of the CloudStack project including ActiveState, Alcatel-Lucent, Alurium, Apalia, Appcara, AppFog, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, BT, Caringo, Clogeny, Cloud Central, CloudSoft, Contegix, CumuLogic, Datapipe, Engine Yard, enStratus, Equinix, Extreme Networks, GigaSpaces, GoDaddy, Gluster, GreenQloud, Hortonworks, HostBill, Intel, jclouds, Juniper Networks, IDC Frontier, Kaavo, KT, LeaseWeb, LogicWorks, Midokura, NetApp, Nexenta, Ninefold, OpsCode, Puppet Labs, Racemi, RightScale, rPath, Scale Computing, ScaleXtreme, Scalr, ServiceMesh, Softlayer, Sungard, SwiftStack, Tata Communications, TCloud Computing, TrendMicro, UShareSoft, VMTurbo, Vyatta, Zenoss and Zuora.

Dor Skuler, VP of Cloud Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent

"The move to an Apache-based project is a great thing for our developers, users and the open source cloud community as it brings a model for open collaboration, innovation and standardization under a proven framework and foundation. Our support and integration of CloudStack into our own CloudBand offerings allows communications service providers to transform their own infrastructures, operations and business models that are specifically designed for the Cloud Era.”

Neil Sutton, Vice President, Global Portfolio, BT Global Services

"The push by Citrix to make CloudStack the Apache of the cloud, coupled with its adoption of industry standard APIs is a really good thing for customers, partners and providers in the cloud. Promoting interoperability between clouds through a proven open cloud platform will enable portability of workloads and provide greater degree of freedom for customers. BT is one of the first global service providers to join the CloudStack project and looks forward to continued contribution and participation in the community around carrier standards, global interoperability and building a foundation for highly scalable cloud solutions. CloudStack’s open systems approach is enabling BT to deliver services that adapt to help customers make the cloud meaningful for their business, giving them global scale with local choice and expertise to meet their requirements.”

Mark Goros, Co-Founder & CEO, Caringo

"By submitting CloudStack to the Apache Foundation, Citrix is providing organizations with a choice in a complete cloud platform based on proven technology and a proven community driven development method. Ultimately this will drive innovation, standardization and cloud adoption and we at Caringo are committed to ensuring interoperability with our object storage software.”

Ed Laczynski, VP of Cloud Strategy and Architecture, Datapipe

"The launch of the new CloudStack project provides a solid foundation for promoting the emergence of cloud standards and interoperability based on a proven open source platform that has been deployed in some of the largest clouds in production, including Datapipe. As a longtime client and technology partner with Citrix, Datapipe is an active participant in the CloudStack project and will continue collaborate closely with the community as it benefits our customers with open APIs, proven practices for cloud operations, and a broad ecosystem of solutions and services.”

John Dillon, CEO, Engine Yard

"At Engine Yard we have a strong belief that open, community-based innovation is essential to the growth and adoption of cloud computing. The selection of the Apache Foundation as the framework for governance and nurturing of the CloudStack community is an important contribution by Citrix that will further drive innovation for all developers in the cloud. Engine Yard is pleased to be participating with Citrix on the proposed Apache CloudStack project by running our leading PaaS on CloudStack and contributing expertise and code to help the project thrive.”

George Reese, CTO at enStratus

"enStratus is excited to see CloudStack joining forces with the Apache Foundation to expand the options for community-governed Open Source platforms. We’ve been delivering enterprise cloud management on top of CloudStack since the days of VMOps, and look forward to contributing to its further development as an Apache Incubator project.”

David Ginsburg, Chief Marketing Officer, Extreme Networks

"Extreme Networks has a long-standing history in supporting and integrating open standards and open source technologies as a model for delivering greater flexibly and control to network operators when architecting for scale and performance. There is a strong correlation between a successful cloud deployments and how well the network has been designed for automation and virtualization at scale. Extreme Networks is a pioneer in cloud networking and we look forward to participating with Citrix in the CloudStack project, contributing to advancement of the networking capabilities purpose-built for highly scalable cloud deployments.”

Brian Krouse, Vice President of Hosting Product Development, Go Daddy

"We love and support the work Citrix is doing with the open source community. Go Daddy uses CloudStack extensively. It all fits beautifully into Go Daddy’s new initiative to do more projects in the open source community. Giving CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation makes CloudStack even stronger, which in turn, is great for the whole cloud ecosystem. Hats off to Citrix!”

Brad Brooks, VP, Software Solutions Division, Juniper Networks

"Juniper Networks is pleased to participate as a member of the CloudStack community. The network, software and open standards play a critical role in how companies are architecting for the increased demand, scale and security required by cloud deployments. We look forward to collaborating with Citrix and the Apache community on the CloudStack project, as well as other open source standards bodies focused on the advancement of a new class of network services.”

Ji-Yun Kim, Head of Cloud Business Unit, KT

"KT has been a pioneer of cloud services, and an early adopter of CloudStack as the platform to control our cloud infrastructure. We look forward to continued collaboration with an even broader CloudStack community of users and developers, and applaud our partners at Citrix for bringing CloudStack to the home of open source standards, the Apache Software Foundation.”

Robert van der Meule, Manager of Cloud, LeaseWeb

"Last month, LeaseWeb launched its new CloudStack-based Express Cloud platform. We’re excited about the decision to strengthen the CloudStack open source basis by becoming part of the Apache Software Foundation, and look forward to develop our next-generation IaaS platform even further, using CloudStack as part of our toolbox. To realize the ambitious feature set we have planned for our public LeaseWeb Cloud platform, a high quality open source orchestration framework is needed. We are confident that collaboration between the open source community and the CloudStack project will deliver just that.”

Patrick Rogers, VP of Data Center Platforms, NetApp

"Open-source development inspires industry collaboration, accelerates innovation, and changes the economics of how technology is consumed by the market. Over the past decade, NetApp’s contributions to open-source projects and open standards have helped redefine the storage industry and pave the way for how solutions are delivered in a multi-tenant, distributed world. NetApp looks forward to collaborating closely with Citrix and the Apache Foundation on driving storage innovation for the Cloud Era and in the open.”

Peter James, Chairman, Ninefold

"For the past year, Ninefold has been delivering the Ninefold Cloud^, an innovative public cloud service based on CloudStack and delivered 100% in Australia. We chose CloudStack because of the platform’s technical capability, it's broad ecosystem and our ability to participate in its open source community. Ninefold will continue to contribute to and build on top of the CloudStack project and look forward to helping the community drive standards, interoperability and innovation in the cloud.”

Luke Kanies, CEO and Founder, PuppetLabs

"CloudStack joining the Apache Foundation is an important step in building a complete, open cloud infrastructure, all under the same license and managed under the same foundation. CloudStack is already a leader in open cloud computing, and this is a bold move and sure to solidify its position.”

Thorsten von Eicken, CTO and Founder, RightScale

"RightScale is delighted by Citrix's commitment to an exciting CloudStack roadmap that builds on the proven success of the platform and expands its open source connections. CloudStack and RightScale power some of the most successful large scale private cloud deployments as well as service provider deployments to date. The majority of our joint customers deploy CloudStack with an Amazon compatible architecture combined with RightScale cloud management for full-featured end user automation. Citrix is clearly building on what we believe to be a winning strategy.”

Indu Kodukula, EVP Products and CTO, SunGard

"Cloud computing is being widely adopted across all industries, geographies and sizes of organizations to align IT with business in a number of different application scenarios ranging from development and testing to big data and analytics. SunGard has a long-standing history of working with open source technologies to deliver IT innovation cost effectively to our enterprise customers. The Apache Software Foundation is absolutely the right forum for driving an effort like CloudStack, and we are excited to collaborate with Citrix and the CloudStack community to contribute insight and technology to help the project thrive.”

Additional Quotes

Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM of Cloud Platforms, Citrix

"While other enterprise vendors will attempt to add cloud-like management layers to their existing proprietary datacenter virtualization products, we believe the biggest winners in the Cloud Era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture, proven at scale in real production clouds, compatible with the Amazon architecture and fully committed to open source. With the significant momentum CloudStack has gained over the past year, it is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements. Joining the Apache Software Foundation demonstrates our deep commitment to the fourth pillar, enabling a broad community of developers and users to innovate, drive industry standards, and encourage interoperability and openness in the cloud. This move will position CloudStack to become the de-facto industry standard platform for cloud computing.”

Stephen O'Grady, Co-founder and Principal Analyst, RedMonk

"Whether it's enterprises building internal private clouds or managed service providers adding cloud services, interest in cloud stacks is growing by the day. CloudStack’s unique combination of an Apache-licensed open source project offering Amazon compatibility is likely to pique the interest of partners and customers alike.”

Related Links:

• Announcement: Citrix to become a Platinum Sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation
• Expert Blog: CloudStack Building "Communities of Inclusion” with Apache
• Expert Blog: CloudStack and Hadoop: a Match Made in the Cloud
• Expert Blogs on today’s news from Citrix partners:
  • ActiveState: "The Cloud Opens Up - Citrix Takes CloudStack to Apache” by Toph Whitmore, VP of Marketing
  • Appcara: Citrix Open Source Commitment Accelerates App Lifecycle Agility and Portability by John Yung, CEO
  • BT: "Is the Sun Poking Out From Behind the Cloud?” by John Gillam, CTO
  • Contegix: "Miracloud, CloudStack and the Commitment to Open Source” by Matthew Porter, CEO
  • Cumulogic: "Citrix CloudStack Platform is Now Apache CloudStack” by Rajesh Ramchandani, founder and VP of Products
  • Datapipe: "Datapipe and CloudStack” by Ed Laczynski, VP of Cloud Strategy and Architecture
  • Engine Yard: "Engine Yard Joins the Apache CloudStack Project” by Bill Platt, VP, Operations
  • enStratus: "enstratus CloudStack and the Apache Foundation” by George Reese, CTO
  • GoDaddy: "Why Citrix Giving CloudStack to the Apache Foundation is Great for the Cloud” by Brian Krouse, VP of Hosting Product Development
  • Hortonworks: "Hortonworks Welcomes Citrix and CloudStack to the Apache Community” by Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-founder and CTO
  • NetApp: "Exposed” by Val Bercovici, Sr. Director, Office of the CTO
  • Nexenta: "Nexenta Supports Citrix CloudStack’s Move to Apache” by Evan Powell, CEO
  • RightScale: "Cloud APIs: It's the Architecture that Matters” by Thorsten von Eicken, CTO
  • ServiceMesh: "Apache CloudStack: AWS for Every Man” by Dave Roberts, SVP, Business Development & Platform Ecosystem
  • Vyatta: "The CloudStack Choice” by Kelly Herrell, CEO
  • Zuora: "Zuora in Good Company with Citrix CloudStack and Apache Software Foundation” by Shawn Price, President
• Expert Blog: Citrix – The Open Source Cloud Powerhouse
• Announcement: Citrix CloudStack 3 Brings the Power of Amazon-Style Clouds to Customers of All Sizes

Follow us online:

• Twitter: @Citrix, @Ulander, @cloudstack, @mrhinkle
• Register for Citrix Synergy 2012, San Francisco
• Citrix on Facebook
• CloudStack on LinkedIn

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) transforms how businesses and IT work and people collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations. Citrix products touch 75 percent of Internet users each day and it partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2011 was $2.21 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

For Citrix Investors

This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The forward-looking statements in this release, including statements concerning CloudStack and the Company’s markets, do not constitute guarantees of future performance. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the future development of open source projects outside the Company’s control, the impact of the global economy and uncertainty in the IT spending environment, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products and services, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein.

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Footnotes

1) IDC’s Public IT Cloud Services Forecast: New Numbers, Same Disruptive Story, July 2010