Cloud-based systems management provider ScaleXtreme has launched support for Citrix CloudStack, expanding its core offering to include yet another stack service.  CloudStack is an open source platform, the result of Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com earlier this year.  In broadening the number of stacks that can be managed from ScaleXtreme’s central platform, the company offers one of the richest systems management services on the market.

“CloudStack is driving emerging cloud standards and bringing order to chaos of multiple hypervisors and APIs. It has had impressive success because it helps companies get quickly into the cloud by simplifying it,” said Nand Mulchandani, co-founder and CEO of ScaleXtreme. “We look forward to working with Citrix to benefit our joint customers, nurture our growing relationship and help users manage the entire server lifecycle.”

The idea is to simplify cloud management, extending a single, unified view to provision and manage servers throughougt their entire lifecycle.  Clients can access and control all their servers across local, hosted, public or private clouds.  And ScaleXtreme itself is cloud-based, so no software deployment is needed.  ScaleXtreme’s latest inclusion of CloudStack support follows the recent addition of OpenStack, joining others like Amazon and VMware for its centralized management system.

ScaleXtreme’s focus on web-based management solutions is proactive in a world of on-demand client needs, creating a cross-platform dashboard of sorts to monitor your servers across providers.  The future Mulchandani sees is one where companies utilize multiple stacks to serve their varied needs, and just as there’s a growing trend around cross-platform services for managing apps on Android and iOS, ScaleXtreme anticipates the benefits of offering a single service for managing multiple clouds.

As ScaleXtreme scales its own business, mobility becomes an increasingly important area of interest.  As we’ve seen from Amazon, Rackspace and VMware, mobile management is a keen perk for IT administrators.  The key players’ dispersed app offerings also present another opportunity for ScaleXtreme.  While the company doesn’t yet have a dedicated mobile app for any of the major OS’s (stay tuned), ScaleXtreme has always ensured web access for its systems management offerings, and that includes the mobile web.

“The way we’re thinking about mobile really depends on the client,” Mulchandani explains.  “Do you need connectivity all the time or can you do some actions offline on your phone?  Believe it or now, we’re looking into SMS and other systems as a way to deliver alerts.  IT administrators have typically used SMS and phone calls for alerts.  We’re looking at a combination of all this technology to give customers what they want, and for mobile browsing, we’re also looking at HTML5.”