Today Citrix announced the acquisition of Cloud.com. Cloud.com is clearly a leader at providing an alternative to VCloud, and one based on Open Source and standards. They aspire to be the "Red Hat" of OpenStack. From this perspective, they fit will into the Citrix Cloud initiatives. But all that said and done, I think it's worth asking the more difficult question about the market. Who buys Cloud platforms and why?
Some years ago, Microsoft argued that there was only a need for a small number of Cloud fabrics because of the economies and market value of scale. Others argued that there would be tens of thousands of Cloud SP's, each serving some valuable niche based on platform (Iaas, PaaS, SaaS), locality and vertical. The later argument is the basis of the energy in the market. Clearly if Microsoft is literally right then there ultimately isn't much of a market for something like Cloud.com.
To try and understand this interesting question better, we've actually talked to a number of SP's. We found some SP's that hadn't thought about the nuances much but also quite a few that had. The knowledgeable ones didn't think that competing with Amazon for what AWS does well was an interesting business opportunity, viewing it instead as a "race to the bottom." They were pretty uniformly focusing insted on some more specific offering, often based on a higher level platform (e.g., supporting SaaS offerings) rather than offering rented VM's.
Now here is where it gets interesting. Many of these more sophisticated SP's also wondered whether over time it would make more sense to build those offerings on something like AWS or Azure rather than having their own under pining fabric. So it's possible that in an important sense Microsoft might be right. The world may only need a relatively few fabrics, just like we need a relatively few power grids or telephony systems. At the same time, those who argued that 10,000 SP's would bloom might be right too, presuming they build on those massive fabrics.
Citrix didn't disclose the price of the acquisition so it's fair to assume it wasn't literally a big deal since it isn't material to Citrix stockholders. If that's true, the industry also may aslo believe that ultimately the market for Cloud.com was limited.
