CloudStack Submitted as the First Cloud Platform in The Apache Software Foundation
Dubai, UAE: 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 (ASF), 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. To this end Citrix has increased its existing commitment to open source and become a platinum sponsor of the ASF and will join fellow ASF sponsors Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to help aid organizational, legal and financial support for numerous Apache projects.
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 capitalise 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 standardisation. 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.
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.
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 virtualisation 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."
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 virtualisation technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organisations. 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.
Citrix® and CloudStack™ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one or more of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Footnotes
1) IDC's Public IT Cloud Services Forecast: New Numbers, Same Disruptive Story, July 2010
For media inquiries, contact:
Slavica Simunovic
Citrix Systems, Inc.
+49 (0) 811 830 039
slavica.simunovic@citrix.com
Thushara Zacharias
Hill+Knowlton Strategies
+971 50 708 3360
thushara.zacharias@hkstrategies.com
© Press Release 2012
