$.5 Billion... Sign, Sealed, Delivered

A short Monday morning post: The Citrix/XenSource deal has been finalized, as expected, to the tune of $500 million in cash and common stock. The Citrix iForum conference in Vegas today will be the formal venue for the announcement as well as the kick-off for Citrix's "end-to-end" virtualization strategy.

Rather than reprinting, please click through for:Acquisition press release

and

Virt Strategy release

All of which has Citrix poised to become a major player at desktop, traditional application/presentation and enterprise server virt platforms. Something for anyone/everyone?Look for Citrix to lean heavily on, er, incentivize, their existing Presentation Server customers to sample the new back-end hosting platforms based on XenEnterprise tech and pending (coming in 2008) desktop virt bundles based on XenDesktop.

Oh, what a time to be alive... I love competition in the marketplace.