‘Cloud era is built on a completely different set of assumptions’
June 15, 2012
Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems shares the company’s vision and strategy for powering cloud services.
Please share Citrix’s vision for powering cloud services.
The cloud era is built on a completely different set of assumptions than past generations of IT — in fact, many of the exceptions from the PC era now represent the norm in the cloud era. This is forcing enterprise IT organizations to re-evaluate IT strategies, causing them to search for lower costs, greater capacity and improved agility. Our vision for powering cloud services starts at the front of the private cloud with a single point of control that unifies the provisioning and security of Windows, web, SaaS and mobile apps through an enterprise storefront. At the back of the private cloud, a bridge to public clouds transparently enables infinite data center capacity. The third element of our cloud services focus is to enable the building of Amazon-style clouds — from bare metal servers, storage and networks to high-level software services…
We found that to be a winner in the cloud, we need to have the following things: Amazon-style architecture and compatibility, proven ability in production and scale and open source cloud.
How acquisitions have helped Citrix enhance and add value to its cloud portfolio?
The nature of work has changed; teams are global, dispersed, social, and mobile. A critical requirement is to empower teams to collaborate, create, manage and share with an increasingly mobile workforce that works outside of the traditional office environment. Thus, this year in April, we announced the acquisition of Podio, which builds on these initial approaches and offers a more robust cloud-based platform where people collaborate and do actual work utilizing social elements.
In October 2011, we acquired ShareFile that helps to securely store, sync and share business documents and files, both inside and outside the company. ShareFile’s centralized cloud storage capability also allows users to share files across multiple devices and access them from any location. In July 2011, we acquired Cloud.com, which brought some marquee customers and a well regarded automation and orchestration platform for Citrix to build upon.
Since the acquisition of Cloud.com, the CloudStack.org open source community has experienced a 4x growth in user engagement, with more than 25,000 cloud builders around the world now signed up as active members of the CloudStack.org community.
Please elaborate on Citrix’s strategy behind moving from OpenStack to CloudStack.
OpenStack-built solutions have difficulty scaling in real production clouds, despite the level of interest and commitment from its partners. We have instead elected to invest more energy in our own orchestration software. We have also moved CloudStack to the Apache Software Foundation. The move was made because we needed a model that fully embraces Amazon Web Service compatibility (which OpenStack does not do) and because we wanted to bring cloud development offerings to market as soon as possible. With an Apache license, CloudStack will now be an open source project, backed by a community of developers who will provide input and recommend changes to the software.
Since its introduction, CloudStack has rapidly become a commercial open source platform for building, managing and delivering scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. CloudStack is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on a platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale. It is not a traditional enterprise server virtualization platform with cloud-like management layers on top. Rather, it was designed from the ground up as an open, multi-hypervisor platform to help customers build public and private clouds the way the world’s most innovative clouds are built – simple, automated, elastic, scalable and efficient. New capabilities in CloudStack 3 focus on openness, flexibility and completeness.