Citrix has announced today that it will launch its own infrastructure-as-a-service based on the OpenStack platform called Project Olympus.

Project Olympus will be available for as a public cloud and as a platform for private clouds. The first version of the service including a "cloud-optimized" version of Xen Server is expected to be available later in the year.

Citrix move to align with OpenStack is significant at a time when many platforms are aiming to become start for cloud computing. The OpenStack platform, which is an open source initiative, was started by Rackspace and NASA and is backed by more than 60 companies, including AMD, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Citrix.

With Project Olympus, Citrix is aiming to compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Joyent and Rackspace. Dell and HP are also planning to launch their own infrastructure-as-a-service offerings soon.

Red Hat's Deltacloud and the NRE Alliance's proposal are some other cloud platforms.