Citrix's Crosby Says It's All Good in the Cloud

In the wake of today's announcement by Citrix that it will provide engineering support to Amazon that will optimize Citrix products and Windows apps running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the always loquacious and opinionated Citrix CTO Simon Crosby put his own spin on developments of the day, noting that AWS is building PaaS the right way (not that Microsoft isn't), VMware is out to lunch for calling AWS a "consumer cloud" (a gratuitous potshot), and Citrix customers can expect "seamless manageability for private and hosted workloads, with role-based, end-to-end management from any enterprise virtualization platform, to the cloud." (Not that Citrix would ever give them anything but the best.)

You know if Simon says this announcement is "perhaps predictably short on detail," as he did, that you're only getting the French pastry, as opposed to the boeuf bourguignon. Undeterred, he goes on to compliment AWS for adding high quality software services such as the Elastic Beanstalk and the RDS Relational Database Service for no incremental charge beyond compute and storage.

Elaborating on his PaaS kudos, Simon says AWS is hitting the mark by offering "highly sticky services that power real world applications," and Citrix looks forward to working with AWS in the future because the company is obviously serious about the enterprise cloud market.

He goes on to note, somewhat vaguely, that the two firms will jointly work toward furthering Citrix's strategic goal of delivering "open, interoperable" cloud solutions via collaboration on Windows, interoperability and the development of value-added cloud solutions.

As for Microsoft--which has a convivial customer relationship with AWS--Simon was nothing less than delighted to explain how this deal is good for Citrix's longstanding ally. As he puts it, "The Azure VM role thus far offers only an ephemeral instance model for Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs. Our collaboration with Amazon will enable Microsoft's Enterprise customers--and SPLA consumers--to confidently select AWS for the more demanding non-ephemeral workloads."

Win, win, and win.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 01/27/2011 at 12:48 PM