| Citrix Acquires XenSource For $500 Million |
| Thursday, 16 August 2007 by Michel Roth | |||
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No seriously, this is huge. With Citrix owning Xensource, Citrix yields new possibilities in the field of Server and Desktop virtualization. IF VDI gains more speed this acquisition could be a very fruitful one. What's even more important: Citrix now has the potential to be an extreme one-stop-shop. They will own the whole stack. Like I said before, I think it would be a tremendous advantage for Citrix to own the whole stack. The key however is that this whole stack is indeed a whole and not just a set of purchased technologies held together by oddly named product packs. I wonder if this acquisition will be the mother to Citrix Presentation Server Titanium Edition... Everybody is of course wondering how the other big players in this market space will react, Microsoft and VMware in particular. I personally think Microsoft definitely knew about the upcoming deal long beforehand. Microsoft will be pleased with this move as it will put Vmware under more pressure while they still continue to have the more than healthy relationship with Citrix. VMware of course is bummed. Citrix was a major component of many (to be) Vmware VDI environments and they can kiss that goodbye now. One aspect of this acquisition that makes it rather special is that XenSource has strong ties with open source companies, which will severed faster than you can say linsux. I wonder how the "open source mindedness" of the people over at XenSource who will need to integrate XenSource with Citrix (or rather the other way around), will play a role in the success of this acquisition. It's hard to tell. A letter from XenSource President Peter J. Levine states: "Open source Xen is the foundation in which XenSource’s success has been built, and the contributions and participation of the community are valued. Citrix shares our commitment that our contributions to open source Xen continue strongly, with the community flourishing transparently without the constraints of commercial software development. To achieve this, we will develop procedures in the very near future for independent oversight of the Xen project. XenSource will absolutely continue on our core strategy of leveraging the valuable innovation of the open source Xen community and creating commercial solutions based on Xen" Perhaps Citrix might not be killing the open source bit of as fast as I thought... In conclusion, I guess the future will tell if this acquisition by Citrix was a good one. My bet is that unless the integration of Xensource across the board is a very perfect fit, Citrix might come out wishing they had saved their 500 million dollars for when Microsoft buys Citrix... Read the Citrix press release here.
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