Mergers, Acquisitions Happen Naturally in the Cloud

The acquisitions season for virtualization giants Citrix and VMware is approaching. Traditionally, we have seen Citrix and VMware announce new acquisitions right around the same time of their conferences taking place.

And since we are on the heels of Citrix Synergy in San Francisco next month, I am betting that Citrix will announce an acquisition of a mobile device management company to augment CloudGateway's capabilities. Many players in this space are prime candidates for an acquisition with a great product and great mind share in the industry, namely Zenprise, MobileIron, AirWatch, MaaS 360 and others.

Zenprise would be cool just because the name would require a single letter change and it would quickly become a member of the Citrix marketing brand of "Xen." Zenprise also packs an impressive set of features for both an on-premise or cloud-based deployment of MDM. Zenprise, on the other hand could also be a target acquisition for F5. In a recent announcement we saw Zenprise extend support for the F5 product for an on-premise, high availability deployment.

That being said, I think Ft. Lauderdale, Florida-based Open Peak is a hidden gem that could be the highlight of the Citrix announcement, located not too far from Citrix headquarters. Open Peak is one of the most impressive MDM solutions out there that has been relatively enterprise-shy. It seems to cater to OEMs and large service providers, and it has not really made a splash in the enterprise. It is worth mentioning that Open Peak is the company that designed the Cius for Cisco. Citrix, or VMware, for that matter, can probably pick up Open Peak for much less than what they would have to dish out for any of the other players. The advantage for Citrix or VMware is that the product can very quickly be integrated with each company's desktop virtualization solutions, the "dropbox" like solutions that both companies have (that is, Citrix's ShareFile and VMware's Project Octopus).

The way I see it is that Citrix and VMware don't really care as much about the install base, since they have a large presence in the enterprise already. But buying Open Peak augments the technology at the right price. I think it is a win, but who will pick them up? Regardless of the vendor you can't go wrong with any of the solutions mentioned here and this space is prime for a consolidation effort. Dell's acquisition of Wyse gives them Trellia. Who will Cisco, Citrix, VMware and possibly Quest pick up?

Posted by Elias Khnaser on 04/16/2012 at 12:49 PM