It’s been a busy week in the world of clouds. Following on the heels of our the newest Abiquo release ( v1.8), VMware rolls out the newest version of vSphere or Cloud Infrastructure as they are calling it, and Citrix makes a play to be a real cloud player by acquiring Cloud.com. It’s interesting to watch Citrix figure out how to compete with VMware in the cloud wars. By aligning themselves with OpenStack through their commercial offering, Project Olympus, and the most recent buy they seem to be positioning to target lots of regional service providers with a low end offering to compete directly with the likes of Amazon. Ironically, as they compete to go head to head with VMware on being “the” cloud platform- they are building out offerings that compete with other Xen users.
On the other hand, we are delighted to see Citrix buy cloud.com, as it validates the need for cloud management as part of any cloud infrastructure stack. Another study recently published by Evolven shows that over 60% of companies have or plan to have private cloud projects this year. These two proof points show that cloud plans are materializing and cloud management is the lynch-pin in moving businesses beyond virtualization and onto cloud environments.
With the Microsoft partner event this week, we see that they now allow for a portal to mange hyper-v environments, assuming you only want manage a single environment- this might be good news for you. Stay tuned to see how this 3-legged battle for the cloud platform plays out and what it means for vendors like, Abiquo, but also for the traditional hardware folks like Cisco, EMC, NetApp, IBM and HP- there seems to be even more musical chairs at play.
A few good blogs on this topic:
James Staten, Forrester: http://blogs.forrester.com/james_staten
Krishnan Subramanian: http://krishworld.com/blog