Just one day before the VMware VMworld 2010 opening keynote, Citrix managed to distract the audience with a major announcement: the acquisition of VMLogix for an undisclosed sum.
VMLogix entered the virtual lab automation (VLA) market in October 2006, in competition with a really short number of companies.
In February 2009 the company signed a deal with Citrix to OEM its flagship product in the Essentials management package, which is available for XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
As Citrix has to enrich its virtual infrastructure to better compete against VMware, this acquisition was largely expected.
The acquisition is expected to complete during the Q3 2010. The VMLogix technology will be fully integrated in the next version of XenServer (6.0?) as well as in the just announced OpenCloud platform.
With VMware owning Akimbi (June 2006), Quest owning Surgient (July 2010) and StackSafe out of business (March 2009?), there are no more virtual lab automation startups out there, except Skytap and the just born CloudShare. But both companies only offers a hosted business model, and this restricts the range of potential bidders.
According to this, in the attempt to become more desirable acquisition targets, both Skytap and CloudShare may want to offer soon a version of its platform for on-premises deployment.