It has been reported on several technology blogs that Citrix Systems has purchased cloud.com for a somewhere between $200 and $250 million. This deal comes a few months after iCloud.com sold for $4.5 million.

It was published on “The Domains” blog that back in February 2010 domainer Larry Fischer had enquired about the domain and had been told that the owner was considering cash offers in excess of $250,000. It is worth noting that it was not just the domain name that was sold here, which does go some way to explain the massively inflated amount. Citrix have also acquired the three year old cloud-computing startup behind the domain name as part of the deal.

The domain name acquired along with the purchase is a lot more catchy than it might have been however, as cloud.com was previously called VMOps. Vmops.com doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!

Although cloud.com is a relatively young company it already provides technology to massive customers such as Apple, Facebook and Nokia. The software is designed to improve companies’ abilities to be able to manage their remote data centres and provides tools if they wish to set themselves up as cloud computing providers in direct competition with companies such as Amazon or Microsoft. Despite the company having an impressive client list and over 70 employees, it had yet to make profit.

This is not the first cloud related purchase made by Citrix, who purchased Xensource, who specialise in data centre virtualisation, back in 2007 with a price tag of $500 million.

Amazon have also been jumping on the cloud band wagon and have acquired the domain cloudplayer.com for their new application to allow you to store your music on their service, offering a “music anywhere” product. They only sourced the domain after the announcement was made however, meaning that the acquisition probably cost a lot more than it would have done if they had purchased it before the product announcement.

Market analysts expect the cloud computing market to be worth in the region of $11 billion by the end of 2013 as an increasing number of companies choose to have their networks hosted remotely by specialist organisations. It’s definitely an exciting space to be watching at the minute, and lots of people are snapping up cloud related domains in the hope of making a tidy profit in the future!

Tweet