Last month, Citrix announced the first building block of its aggressive cloud platform strategy by submitting its market-leading open source CloudStack platform to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. With support from over 50 key ecosystem partners and universal approval from the Foundation’s committers, the Apache Software Foundation accepted CloudStack into its Incubator program.  Based on the technology from Apache CloudStack, Citrix CloudPlatform is now a key component of the Citrix cloud computing portfolio, providing customers with solutions that make it easy to build new clouds, connect to existing cloud services, and deliver unparalleled cloud services with the best security, performance and reliability. This new platform delivers a robust, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform to help customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds.

Since its introduction, Apache CloudStack has rapidly become the leading open source platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds for a wide range of customers such as Datapipe, Edmunds.com, IDC Frontier, Nokia Research and LogicWorks. Building off of its success, Citrix CloudPlatform is designed to ensure organizations can build production cloud environments on an open source platform designed for economics, elasticity and scale – complete with commercial engagement and support from Citrix. New capabilities in Citrix CloudPlatform focus on performance, interoperability and advanced enterprise features that include:

• Built In Amazon API Compatibility - Cloud interoperability and portability is one of the top requirements for enterprises building clouds today. Citrix CloudPlatform will continue to integrate and extend compatibility for the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) into the core platform to achieve “proven Amazon compatibility.” With these integrations, customers will be able to build and deploy cloud applications across both Citrix CloudPlatform services and the Amazon Web Services public cloud using EC2-compatible tools.
  
  
• Software Defined Networking Enabled - Networks are a critical component of any large public or private cloud deployment.  Leveraging the innovation in new open networking standards, Citrix CloudPlatform delivers a Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller that leverages the open virtual switch technology in XenServer® 6.0 to provide a scalable alternative to VLAN isolation, eliminating complexity and increasing networking performance and scale.
  
  
• Project Avalon Integrations - Project Avalon, also launched today at Synergy, will transform any Windows app or desktop into a cloud service delivered across any network to any device. Citrix CloudPlatform integrates support for large scale deployments of Project Avalon, providing the management and orchestration layer for the innovative Windows-as-a-Service and Desktop-as-a Service offering.

Citrix CloudPlatform already has 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. The CloudStack community also reached an important milestone, with the addition of its 60th partner to its quickly growing roster of well-known companies, with customers standing up over 100 new clouds a month on CloudStack.

Availability
Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack will be generally available in June.

Quote
“We’ve had a groundswell of support from developers and partners following our announcement to submit CloudStack to the Apache Foundation. Our customers are defining success with a scalable, flexible and powerful revenue-driving cloud. The emerging ecosystem is truly engaged and we cannot wait to see the future innovations deriving from the community.”
- Sameer Dholakia, group vice president and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix

Related Links:

• Announcement: Citrix Charts “Path to the Cloud” at Synergy San Francisco
• Announcement: Citrix Project Avalon Delivers Windows as a Cloud Service
• Expert Blog: XenServer – We are the Champions!
• Expert Blog: It’s a Go – CloudStack Accepted into the Apache Incubator
• Expert Blog: Beware of Open Washing – Three Key Questions To Ask Your Software Vendor

Follow us online:

• Twitter: @Citrix, @Ulander, @cloudstack, @mrhinkle
• Citrix on Facebook

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 virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organizations. 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 http://www.citrix.com.

For Investors
This release contains forward-looking statements which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.  The forward-looking statements in this release do not constitute guarantees of future performance.  Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, including risks associated with the impact of the global economy and uncertainty in the IT spending environment, revenue growth and recognition of revenue, products and services, their development and distribution, product demand and pipeline, economic and competitive factors, the Company’s key strategic relationships, acquisition and related integration risks as well as other risks detailed in the Company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Citrix assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release or with respect to the announcements described herein. 

The development, release and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion and is subject to change without notice or consultation. The information provided is for informational purposes only and is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions or incorporated into any contract.

Apache CloudStack is an open source cloud computing platform currently undergoing incubation at The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. 

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