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Citrix Delivers Self-Service Cloud Management
A new release of CloudPortal Business Manager provides a platform for Anything as a Service.
Citrix in April finally released version 2.0 of its CloudPortal Business Manager cloud services delivery platform.
CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 is the first time the product has been updated since Citrix acquired it two years ago by way of the Cloud.com acquisition, according to Tom McCafferty, senior director of product marketing within the Citrix Cloud Platforms Group.
"CloudPortal Business Manager is kind of a self-service or management overlay that sits on top of our CloudPlatform orchestration system. That's what it was originally designed to do," McCafferty explained in a briefing. "It was for cloud service providers, building an Infrastructure as a Service [IaaS] cloud, who needed a way to deliver that service to their end users. And they needed a way to connect that service on the back-end of their business to meter and bill it."
Over the past two years, CloudPortal Business Manager has evolved as its user base has shifted to larger enterprises, according to McCafferty, who noted that those organizations are increasingly looking at the cloud as a "strategic initiative" rather than just a portal for technical users.
"They're starting to look at, 'Well, we have an internal [IaaS] cloud, we have a lot of Software as a Service applications that we're consuming, we're considering a move to Desktop as a Service -- so everything is becoming a cloud-based-as-a-service thing. And as they're thinking through that, they're building strategies around the cloud that require that their IT department become their own self-service, cloud service broker," he said. "And that's what we've evolved this product into. We've taken it from what used to be a portal for [IaaS] only to now a platform for Anything as a Service."
Anything as a Service -- or XaaS, as Citrix calls it -- entails the ability to unify the delivery of the "commerce, user management, provisioning and operational aspects of a cloud."
"It's all about delivering a central point of control for all cloud services consumed, whether you're a service provider or an enterprise," McCafferty said.
Evolving CloudPortal Business Manager from a portal to a platform means the version 2.0 of the product is more open, with new SDKs and APIs, according to McCafferty. A customization SDK, cloud service SDK and Business Support System (BSS)/Operations Support System (OSS) APIs are now available.