Virtualization powerhouse Citrix Systems Inc. has become the latest sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation in a major change of direction that could spell the beginning of the end for its homegrown alternative. That project has been lagging behind its more widely-known rival in adoption for quite some time.

Now that its main backer has apparently switched alliances, the CloudStack project could see less development effort. Although that likely won’t happen in the foreseeable future, the prospect is still alarming for the several hundred organizations that are using the platform to power their infrastructure. However, the move is undeniably positive for Citrix in the big picture.

The decision to back OpenStack comes only months after the company’s biggest rival – VMware, Inc. – likewise got behind the project with the introduction of an internally developed distribution designed to run on its hypervisor. Citrix had abandoned its efforts to create a commercial cloud operating system back in 2012, shortly before releasing CloudStack, and apparently doesn’t intend to revive the effort, but will likewise focus on promoting its virtualization technology in the upstream community.

The target of the push is entirely different, however. Whereas VMware is aiming to help developers at companies that already use its platform to learn how to build applications on top, Citrix is taking the opposite approach and trying to have organizations that adopt OpenStack pick up its competing XenServer hypervisor in the process.

The upstream version of the software, Xen, already powers most of the major public clouds and a number of smaller platforms as well, including that of Rackspace, Inc., which is one of the original creators of OpenStack. Targeting the global enterprises and tier-two providers that are now deploying the platform in an effort to replicate the success of those early adopters is a natural continuation of Citrix’s competitive efforts.

But the push is about much more than just XenServer. The company also plans to use its newly bought voice in the OpenStack community to promote the complementary NetScaler application delivery controller, which is specifically designed for the kind of hybrid cloud use cases that the project was created to enable.

It’s worth nothing that both technologies already work with the platform, but the integrations are fairly narrow, which means that setting up a Citrix-powered OpenStack environment still takes a good amount of tinkering. The company could leverage its upgraded community status to establish closer partnerships with key distributions and deliver pre-packaged reference architectures to help simplify that deployment process.

That would significantly lower the entry barrier to implementing the software on OpenStack and thereby broaden the appeal. But it remains to be seen whether Citrix’s decision to fully embrace the platform, which comes three years later than it could (and in retrospect, probably should) have will provide the desired strategic boost.