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Citrix buys System Center control freak, sells CloudPlatform

And for good measure gives XenDesktop and XenMobile a tweak or three

Citrix has offloaded its CloudPlatform products to Accelerite, bought Comtrade's System Center Operations Manager management packs and tweaked some of its software.

The sale first: Accelerite is a subsidiary of India's Persistent Systems, a software-developer-for-hire that created Accelerite to sell products instead of services. The subsidiary specialises in cloud and endpoint management software and claims to have over 3,000 customers and to manage more than 10 million endpoints.

The 300-person outfit has offices in the USA, India, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Singapore and Australia. The company has grown by acquiring unwanted products from enterprise vendors such as Intel, OpenWave and HP.

CloudPlatform is a cloud orchestration suite based on Apache CloudStack. The software can wrangle apps of all sorts on any platform.

Citrix has positioned the sale as focussing on its core cloud products, namely NetScaler, XenServer and Citrix Workspace Cloud. And fair enough: Citrix these days doesn't pitch for mainstream compute workloads, preferring its niches in application delivery. CloudPlatform looks to be a stretch for a company that has already announced it will sell off its “GoTo” SaaS business to help it slim down and focus.

Accelerite CEO Nara Rajagopalan is talking up the sale as strengthening one of the company's core businesses, namely cloud infrastructure management. Both companies are promising that customers won't notice any adverse changes and that the transaction will mean that their paths to the cloud are forever strewn with flowers.

And now for the purchase of Comtrade's SCOM management packs. Comtrade makes software that, among other things, makes it possible to manage Citrix software in Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM). Owning such code makes sense for Citrix, as plenty of users will have SCOM and want a single control freak with which to wrangle Citrix environments. Citrix can now sell 'em just such kit.

News of the deal came as Citrix kicked off a new Summit, at which it announced that XenMobile can now support Windows 10 and Mac OS laptops in addition to other mobile devices. There's also tighter Samsung KNOX integration in the new version 10.3. XenDesktop's had a tweak, too, with version 7.7 due last year emerging with the addition of Skype for Business within virtual desktops. The company's also outlined version 7.8 of the software, due this quarter and adding the ability to vary virtual desktop master images without making a mess of things along the way. ®

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