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Citrix Bows Out of Cloud Management Market

Just two months after divesting its "GoTo" product lineup, Citrix Systems on Tuesday announced it was moving its restructuring efforts forward with the sale of its cloud management portfolio.

Citrix is selling its CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager product lines to Accelerite, according to a blog post by Steve Wilson, Citrix vice president of Core Infrastructure.

"We at Citrix are extremely confident that Accelerite will help nurture our customers, who are heavily invested in running their public, commercial clouds on these solutions and will allow Citrix to focus on our core priorities around the secure delivery of apps and data," Wilson blogged.

Both CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager are based on CloudStack, the open source cloud platform that Citrix embraced years ago. CloudStack has been marginalized in the industry, mostly by the ascendance of OpenStack, an open source competitor which has gained dominance in the hybrid cloud space.

The announcement will not surprise anyone who has watched Citrix's moves over the past year. Last November, Citrix declared that it was divesting itself of its GoTo products, including GoToAssist, GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, Grasshopper and OpenVoice. At the same time, the company announced a layoff of about 1,000 people.

That followed the killing of XenClient in September and VDI-in-a-Box earlier in 2015, moves that demonstrate the way Citrix is pushing all its chips into the center of its Workspace Cloud table. Citrix describes Workspace Cloud as "a single unified, global, and multi-tenant SaaS platform to create complete workspaces." 

One of Workspace Cloud's primary aims is enterprise mobility management. The core products in its lineup include XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile and NetScaler.

Nara Rajagopalan, CEO of Accelerite, said in a press release that the acquisition fills a hole in the enterprise infrastructure company's offerings:

"Cloud infrastructure software is one of the three pillars of Accelerite. Today, our cloud software portfolio includes disaster recovery and enterprise self-service solutions. The addition of CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager product lines will help round out our portfolio and enables us to offer complete end-to-end life cycle management for public and private clouds."

Citrix's cuts, to both products and employees, gained significant momentum when activist investment firm Elliott Management got a seat on its board of directors. Elliott stated in a memo that it thought Citrix could improve its corporate health by paring down and getting rid of all non-core products and operations. It appears the ripples of that strategy are continuing to be felt.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

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