This week at Synergy Citrix launched their Citrix C3 Cloud service, which in fairness has been available for implementation for many months now, however they have now partnered with the Cloud heavyweight Amazon for delivery using EC2 and S3 as part of their standard technology projects.
C3 was marketed last year as a bundle of Citrix technologies positioned to the cloud provider, this week it also added XenDesktop and XenApp to the mix allowing cloud providers to simply deliver a SaaS or DaaS.
C3 Lab from Citrix is the first offering that will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Obviously VMware have also been making a play in this area and have their cloud concept also through vSphere, the main commonality between them all should be the use of the OVF format ultimately, which will allow the consumer to utilise any cloud provider they want with minimal migration headaches.
C3 Lab is to provide an inexpensive, pre-configured environment that starts with access to Citrix XenApp alongside key Citrix C3 technologies such as Citrix Access Gateway and Citrix Repeater.
Users will be able to test application compatibility and staging and gain experience of the AWS cloud.