Hong Kong, 18 April 2012 – Citrix has unveiled the next phase of its strategy to accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing. The company's popular CloudStack™ solution – a key part of its strategy – will become the first cloud platform in the industry to be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), home of the world's most successful open source projects. Elevating CloudStack into a full open source Apache project will further Citrix's target of delivering a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic cloud platform for customers of all sizes.

The move follows Citrix's announcement in early April that it would increase its existing commitment to open source and become a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a non-profit, volunteer-run open source foundation. Citrix will join fellow ASF-sponsors Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide organisational, legal and financial support for numerous Apache projects. Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.

By submitting CloudStack to ASF, the Foundation will gain more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than US$1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. To capitalise on this market momentum, Citrix will also deliver a commercially-supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution as the centerpiece of its cloud infrastructure product portfolio.

"We're pleased to welcome Citrix into the ranks of our individual and corporate sponsors whose generosity helps advance the day-to-day operations of The Apache Software Foundation," said ASF Chairman Doug Cutting. "This support helps us successfully shepherd more than 100 top-level projects, incubate dozens of open source innovations, broaden community outreach, and enhance the lives of countless users and developers The Apache Way. The submission of Citrix CloudStack, as our first cloud platform, will further those aims significantly."

The transition to the Cloud Era is fueling a massive build out of cloud infrastructure, projected to exceed US$11 billion by the end of 2014[1]. The Apache Software Foundation is leading the way with highly successful projects like Hadoop, Hive and Cassandra that were initially developed in large, successful clouds like Facebook and Yahoo!, then released for broader use under the Apache License. This new market will feature thousands of successful clouds of all shapes and sizes, ranging from business, infrastructure and developer offerings, to consumer, mobile and gaming services. The proposed Apache CloudStack project will make it easier for customers of all types to deliver cloud services on a platform that is open, powerful, flexible and "Proven Amazon Compatible."

"While other enterprise vendors will attempt to add cloud-like management layers to their existing proprietary datacenter virtualization products, we believe the biggest winners in the Cloud Era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture, fully committed to open source," said Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM of Cloud Platforms, Citrix. "With the significant momentum CloudStack has gained over the past year, it is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements. This move will position CloudStack to become the de-facto industry standard platform for cloud computing."

Related links:

·          Expert Blog: CloudStack Building "Communities of Inclusion" with Apache

·          Expert Blog: CloudStack and Hadoop: a Match Made in the Cloud

·          Appcara: Citrix Open Source Commitment Accelerates App Lifecycle Agility and Portability by John Yung, CEO

·          BT: "Is the Sun Poking Out From Behind the Cloud?" By John Gillam, CTO

·          NetApp: "Exposed" by Val Bercovici, Sr. Director, Office of the CTO

·          Vyatta: "The CloudStack Choice" by Kelly Herrell, CEO

Follow us online:

·          Twitter: @Citrix, @Ulander, @cloudstack, @mrhinkle

·          Register for Citrix Synergy 2012, San Francisco

·          Citrix on Facebook

·          CloudStack on LinkedIn

About Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS) transforms how businesses and IT work and people collaborate in the cloud era. With market-leading cloud, collaboration, networking and virtualization technologies, Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services, making complex enterprise IT simpler and more accessible for 260,000 organisations. Citrix products touch 75 percent of Internet users each day and it partners with more than 10,000 companies in 100 countries. Annual revenue in 2011 was US$2.21 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

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