Following all the hype surrounding Citrix's $US500 million acquisition of virtualization software vendor XenSource late last year, the local operations is now fully equipped to service and support local buyers.

Citrix Systems Asia Pacific vice president Rob Willis said the company has hired about 12 people to concentrate on the XenSource product suite across sales, support and consulting.

No local developers have been hired to work on the Xen open source hypervisor project, but the local advanced product development group is looking at ways to integrate Xen with the other products.

"We've moved aggressively to build up local expertise and now the mechanics of customer service is the same as our other products," Willis said, adding that local customers can get 24 by 7 support for XenSource products.

Being an open source project, Xen now has broad industry adoption, including big names like Oracle, Novell and Sun Microsystems, and a number of local developers working on it.

Willis said it is good that Xen has received broad industry adoption and Citrix is exploring structures to make its relationship with the open source developers clearer.

However, that is unlikely to translate into direct hiring of Aussie Xen hackers as Citrix's XenSource development operations are already established.

"We remain committed to open source and it is an evolving picture," Willis said. "Some changes come back to the main code base and some don't, so we need to focus on being an end-to-end virtualization provider."

Xen may have become the de facto virtualization platform for Linux, but, ironically, don't expect to see Citrix applications running natively on Linux any time soon.

"It's market driven and we never got the uptake on Linux," Willis said. "Our focus for XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) is as a Windows application which we recommend customers run on bare metal for performance reasons."

Willis said Citrix has partnered with Microsoft to develop Linux extensions for its Hyper-V platform.