Citrix snaps up Cloud.com

In a deal that underscores the rising graph of exits for technology venture funds, Nexus Venture backed start-up Cloud.com has been acquired by Citrix Systems in the US, reports Economic Times.

With Cloud.com, Citrix is going after the so-called private cloud market - cloud computing services that companies run on their own machines.

For instance, a business' branch office would connect to a corporate data centre in a different location. Service providers also use Cloud.com's software to host computing jobs for customers says Bloomberg.

Datamation reports that Citrix is a key backer of the open source OpenStack platform and that is a direction that Cloud.com is now headed toward as well.

Citrix will use the acquisition to enhance the work it does on the OpenStack open-source cloud platform, of which it, Cloud.com and more than 60 other companies are members.

Citrix will also continue to add to Project Olympus, which is a combination of the OpenStack cloud with Citrix XenServer, further reports ZDNet.

In order to better focus on this emerging market of cloud software, Citrix has started a new business division, called the Cloud Platforms Product Group, which will be headed by Sameer Dholakia.

Dholakia was the former CEO of virtualisation vendor VMLogix, which Citrix acquired last year, says PCWorld.

Cloud.com customers include companies such as Nokia, GoDaddy and Zynga, which offers the popular Farmville series of online games.