Citrix buys XenSource – it’s official

It’s official Citrix are buying XenSource, they don’t indicate the amount in their press release but it is stated elsewhere the amount is USD 500 million.

It’s good that the XenSource guys have realised their work. Although of course that now leaves us wondering what next for XenServer as a platform.

Some comments indicate that Citrix have paid too much. That is possible as a purchase is not only defined by how much you pay, but also by how well you can use the it. Only value to a fast cat in NZ is looking good, but in Germany you can actually drive it fast. The ability of Citrix can turn this 500 million purchase into something of greater value to themselves, their current customers and their new customers remains to be seen.

It is worth considering this also in the context of the VMWare IPO. 20 billion market cap for a VMWare owned by EMC which has a market cap of 38 billion. Share markets are funny places.

Regardless as this commentary notes:

Vmware will NOT settle far below the price from yesterday. Less than 5% of all x86 servers are running in a virtual environment. That leaves 95% of the servers as candidates for Vmware.

There is still a lot of grow in the virtualisation market. And that is just the server market. Desktop virtualisation is just as interesting – VMWare’s ACE is quite a cool little addition to Workstation 6. Citrix is a massive player in the desktop market, but without some one XenSource they had nothing, now they have a chance.

For current and users in the last stages of planning it does complicate matters. How is the XenServer stack now going to evolve under Citris. Will they build on the strength of the open source platform? Can they actually understand it? Or will XenServer as a product simply disappear into their stack.

Given today is basically the last chance to make a decision about whether to buy additional licenses before the price goes up it is a tough choice.

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