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Citrix rips up and rebuilds CloudStack business

Veteran cloud kids depart

Citrix has shaken up its cloud division with at least one senior executive checking out.

The company has combined its Cloud Platforms and Cloud Networking groups to create the Networking, Cloud and Service Provider Group (NCSP).

Group vice president and general manager for the Cloud Platforms Group, Sameer Dholakia, has left Citrix to “explore new opportunities” Citrix told us.

Dholakia joined Citrix in 2007 with the purchase of his company VMLogix and succeeded to the position of vice president of marketing.

He’d run the disbanded cloud and platforms group for just over three years.

Taking over as vice president and general manager of the new unit is the former chief of the old cloud networking group, Klaus Oestermann.

Oestermann has been with Citrix since 2003. The exec also spends his time as a serial investor, advisor and board member in other companies.

Citrix claimed Oestermann had rapidly scaled the cloud networking business and established Citrix as a leader in the space.

Also gone gone are the Cloud Platforms chief technology officer Sheng Liang and the group’s vice president of market development Shannon Williams.

Both joined with Citrix’s buy of Cloud.com in 2011. Cloud.com was the so-hot-it-hurt startup which let you build your own private, Amazon-like clouds. Liang was Cloud.com’s founder and CEO and Williams was the company’s vice president of worldwide sales.

Both had been deployed to Cloud Platforms inside Citrix in 2011 – at the same time as Dholakia was moved from marketing to run the operation.

A company spokesperson conformed the departure of all three, with Williams and Liang going to a new, unnammed venture together.

According to Citrix, the reorg will allow Citrix to “optimize Citrix cloud and networking delivery infrastructure for enterprise and service provider customers”.

The spokesperson said it now expects “synergies" between its cloud and networking products and support for company’s Mobile Workspaces drive.

Citrix came out with its own cloud strategy in 2012 after walking out of the OpenStack party it had taken a hand in running with Rackspace since 2010. The company bought Cloud.com a year later and then donated the code from Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), creating CloudStack as yet another cloud platform alternative to Amazon. ®

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