Citrix Throws a Spanner in the Cloud Market, Submits CloudStack to Apache Foundation

There are interesting views emerging from the industry analysts. Krishnan Subramanian, Principal Analyst from Rishidot Research has brilliantly analyzed the impact this announcement may have on OpenStack. He thinks that this move in a way endorses the open source Cloud offerings and makes them much more potential alternatives. He also says that this will force OpenStack to innovate better, which will ultimately benefit the Cloud consumers.

Lydia Long, Research VP at Gartner says that Citrix stands to benefit from this move. According to her, customers who choose CloudStack will prefer to choose XenServer and buy commercial support from Citrix. She thinks that CloudStack is gaining better real world adoption than OpenStack and this move may not be looked as a failed attempt from Citrix to compete against OpenStack.

Randy Bias, CTO, CloudScaling wonders if Citrix did this under the pressure of justifying the return on investment from the expensive acquisition of Cloud.com. He says that it is a welcome sign to see open source solutions becoming highly desirable for building open cloud infrastructure.

Overall, I personally believe that the community stands to gain from this move. Here is an analogy - Despite the presence of many commercial Java web containers, Apache Tomcat is the most preferred Java Web Container on the Internet. Apache already has made significant contributions in the Cloud space in the form of Hadoop, Hive, Mahout and other open source Big Data solutions. Will Apache CloudStack become the Tomcat of the Cloud world by offering a reliable Cloud management platform? Let’s wait and watch!

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in