Vyatta + Citrix

Yesterday, Vyatta announced a partnership and a new round of investment with Citrix Systems. I wanted to spend a bit of time here explaining why this is important to the market moving forward.

First, a new round of investment is always a good thing when you're a new company. Beyond the obvious goodness of "cash in the bank," this investment shows that Vyatta is really on to something big, and other people believe that, too. If you're working at a startup right now, you can probably attest that funding rounds are few and far between. In the same way that we say a huge number of startup deaths in 2001 and 2002 as investors sat on their hands and money dried up, the same thing has happened with the recent economic troubles, only far worse. There are many VC industry pundits that are predicting a 50% decline in the number of VC firms when this recession is said and done. With that as a backdrop, only the best companies are able to take in new money. I'm happy to say that Citrix has validated Vyatta's importance moving forward.

Now, the question is, why would a company like Citrix make such an investment. The short answer is that there is a lot of synergy (no pun intended for those who attended Citrix's Synergy conference last month in Las Vegas) between Vyatta and Citrix. Citrix is focused on building the best application delivery infrastructure possible. Citrix has application products, services like GoToMeeting, a number of appliances such as NetScaler, and virtualization infrastructure in the form of XenServer. Vyatta compliments those products in several areas.

First, Vyatta works well with Citrix's existing appliance products. Put Vyatta and NetScaler together, for instance, and you have a very effective data center networking and application delivery optimization solution.

Second, Vyatta works well with XenServer. Vyatta has always virtualized well; today, we run on XenServer, VMware, open source Xen, Hyper-V, and even some things like Sun/Oracle VirtualBox (though we only officially support XenServer, VMware, and open source Xen). I think it's now clear that virtualization is a key technology that will impact almost all areas of IT infrastructure, from the data center to the branch office. Further, virtualization is a key technology in the implementation of cloud computing. Citrix has been very strong in putting forth a cloud strategy with its Citrix Cloud Center (C3) architecture and product portfolio. Last month, Citrix announced NetScaler VPX, a virtual appliance version of NetScaler. In the same way that Vyatta compliments NetScaler and other Citrix technologies in the physical world, Vyatta is a perfect compliment to C3 products and technologies in the virtual world. To show how Vyatta might be used in some cloud scenarios, Citrix has included Vyatta in a couple of its C3 Blueprints.

So, there you have it.