Citrix Spreading the Xen Sauce

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton describes his company's acquisition of XenSource as its biggest and most important to date.

Virtualization in its various forms, from desktop to server and application virtualization, dominated the Citrix iForum user conference. And with the closing of the XenSource acquisition on the first day of the conference, Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton described the acquisition as the biggest and most important for Citrix to date.

"The server virtualization market is huge. There is plenty of room for another one or two more companies to play a great role," Templeton said in an interview with eWEEK. Templeton also said he believes the desktop virtualization technology XenSource brings in Citrixs new XenDesktop offering also represents another "huge opportunity." And XenSource has many other opportunities to have an impact on other parts of Citrixs business, he said.

"Spreading the Xen sauce in the company—giving other teams in the online service, appliances [and] Presentation Server access to this Hypervisor core technology will prove to be transformational," Templeton said.

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Click here to read more about how Citrix is rounding out its virtualization offerings with XenSource technology.

Former XenSource CEO Peter Levine, now senior vice president and general manager of the virtualization and management division for Citrix, based in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., also said he believes the synergies are numerous.

"Well see our reseller base go from 350 to 5,000 at Citrix. Thats massive uptake," Levine told eWEEK. "We are very excited to be part of this much bigger organization. We have momentum, scale and channel presence to create a very viable offering to our customers. We view this as a platform to help us get there," he said.

And although the HP and Dell deals were already in the "pipeline" before the acquisition deal was struck, having Citrix behind XenSource helped to "accelerate those deals," Levine said. And there are more deals in the pipeline, he added.

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