Multi-cloud connectivity behind Citrix acquisition of Cedexis
Citrix's acquisition of Cedexis marks its entry into the business of connecting multiple cloud data centers. Citrix is expected to combine NetScaler with Cedexis technology.
Citrix has acquired traffic management company Cedexis, a move that takes Citrix into the business of connecting multiple data centers running cloud computing environments.
The Citrix acquisition of Cedexis was announced this week without the release of financial details. Analysts expect Citrix to use Cedexis' technology as a complement to Citrix NetScaler, which carriers and service providers use in their cloud environments to improve the performance of networks serving customers' hosted applications.
"Citrix is becoming a cloud company," Jack Gold, principal analyst for J. Gold Associates, based in Northborough, Mass., said of Citrix's acquisition. "What they want to be is the transport layer [between cloud data centers]."
Cedexis gathers data on the performance of content delivery networks, internet service providers and the data centers of cloud providers to determine the best path on the public internet for customers' application traffic. Cedexis also provides analytics that details the conditions behind the path choices.
The company collects performance data from the web-facing applications of customers, which include Airbus, Comcast, Lenovo and Microsoft.
NetScaler in Citrix's acquisition of Cedexis
Citrix is becoming a cloud company.
Jack Goldprincipal analyst, J. Gold Associates
Citrix, which reported $2.8 billion in revenue last year, is likely to combine Cedexis with NetScaler in a way to help organizations move large amounts of data across multiple data centers.
"You're talking about large data sets that have to move around a lot, and you have to move them between clouds," Gold said.
Citrix sells NetScaler as an application delivery controller and embeds it in other networking products. They include the NetScaler SD-WAN and a Citrix management and analytics system.
Citrix has made selling to cloud providers an important initiative within the company. Cedexis addresses that strategy by providing technology Citrix can use to target cloud providers under pressure to deliver services with higher reliability and performance.
"This deal can help Citrix customers mitigate business risks, as well as preserve a company's reputation, which increasingly depends on great-performing application services," said Stephen Elliot, an analyst at IDC.
The overall cloud market in 2017 reached $180 billion, a 24% increase from the previous year, according to Synergy Research Group, based in Reno, Nev. Infrastructure and platform as a service led the market with roughly 45%, followed by software as a service, hosted private clouds, unified communications as a service, and public and private cloud infrastructure.
