The two companies intend to bring cloud computing into the mainstream and to elevate the benefits of virtualization.

3Tera, Inc., a provider of cloud computing technology and utility computing services, today announced a partnership with Citrix Systems, Inc. to make enterprise grade cloud computing solutions available to customers in external hosted clouds, or as a platform that can be deployed in corporate data centers behind customer firewalls.

The company articulates that by combining the new Citrix Cloud Center solution with its AppLogic Cloud Computing Platform, both companies are elevating the benefits of virtualization to a new level – from physical servers and virtual machines to entire virtual data centers and applications running in the cloud. The initial focus of the collaboration between the companies will center on the new Citrix XenServer Cloud Edition, a component of the Citrix C3 product family. The company claims that the XenServer Cloud Edition offers the benefits of the Xen-based virtualization technology along with cloud infrastructure capabilities specifically defined by it. It adds that it will also embed XenServer Cloud Edition in future versions of its AppLogic Cloud Computing platform.

"As cloud computing moves from early adopters to mainstream users, new customers are demanding enterprise levels of reliability, support and control. Our Cloudware architecture allows us to work with Citrix to incorporate commercial, industrial strength virtualization into AppLogic," said Barry X Lynn, Chairman and CEO, 3Tera. "Adding XenServer Cloud Edition to our application packaging technology, global cloud presence, and disaster recovery appliances creates the first open cloud computing platform ready for mission critical applications."

"With the introduction of Citrix Cloud Center (C3), Citrix offers a solution to manage the information technology infrastructure of next generation data centers," said AJ Jennings, vice president of business development, Citrix Systems. "We carefully chose 3Tera to be one of our first strategic partners for C3 because of their deep experience offering a full and open cloud computing platform for running multi-tier applications in a massively scalable global cloud."