For years now, the virtualization community has discussed the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft around virtualization, started when the former acquired XenSource in August 2007.
At the end of last week, Simon Crosby, CTO of Data Center & Cloud division at Citrix, published a new post on his corporate blog, trying to clarify, once again, the dynamics of this partnership.
Compared to the past attempts, the go-to-market strategy detailed in this new post is more explicit than ever (emphasis our):
…Neither company [Microsoft and Citrix] wants to monetize the hypervisor.
…The Citrix position is that the role of XenServer is to offer a compelling feature set that permits Citrix and Microsoft to compete successfully with VMware…
…If a customer chooses XenServer today because it offers features not present in Hyper-V, (such as IntelliCache) the customer can be sure that Citrix has no interest in locking the customer to that choice: XenServer is 100% compatible with Hyper-V and if the customer replaces XenServer with Hyper-V in the future, we have no issue with that whatsoever…
Meanwhile Citrix and Microsoft both win at the expense of our joint competitor. I can Also assure you that we tell Microsoft everything we know about building a great virtualization platform.
A small number of readers already provided interesting comments to the post above. One of them highlights how the sales representatives may have not received the memo about non-competition:
Citrix doesn’t compete with Microsoft, yet my Microsoft account rep has been begging me to meet with them over our decision to use XenServer and XenDesktop to “change our mind”.
Citrix may not be competing but Microsoft certainly is.