Citrix to Open-Source XenServer
In response to a story posted last week at virtualization.info by Alessando Perilli, Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, revealed that Citrix is about to fully open-source XenServer -- not Xen, which is already developed and maintained by the open source community -- but XenServer, its commercial implementation.
Crosby spilled the beans after reacting to Perilli's piece about Citrix joining the Linux Foundation. Following is Crosby's full statement: "XenServer is 100 percent free, and also shortly fully open sourced. There is no revenue from it at all. That is strategically aligned with our goal to increase market share, get directly to customers and also provide Citrix customers with virtualization built into our core products as a core capability, so every XenApp customer has free support for XS built into their XenApp entitlement, ditto for XenDesktop. Our positive revenue comes from Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, which adds all of the automation functions for management of virtualized environments and self-service virtual lab and stage management. This is a substantial business, growing rapidly, but also offers customers value through inclusion in the value-added stacks (Enterprise/Platinum editions) of XenDesktop and XenApp. It is therefore not possible to make a direct head-to-head comparison with VMware, which doesn't have a competitor to XenApp, and whose competitor to XenDesktop doesn't scale at present."
One other piece of fallout: Crosby claimed that XenServer costs VMware $300 million per year in lost revenue -- which is a good chunk of change for a company with $740 million in combined revenues from its U.S., international and services operations (these numbers reported last week. Click here for details).
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 10/29/2009 at 12:48 PM