I hate to say this, but there are almost too many choices for enterprises.  enterprises are dealing with critical infrastructure that has been deemed to be "legacy" by the likes of Facebook, Google, and more.  To keep these systems up and running while exploring the multitude of options for a next generation IT infrastructure is a monumental task.  Not to mention the fact that nearly every vendor is marketing a similar story.

I wouldn't call it a minefield, more like an asteroid belt.  Enterprises must navigate a maze of challenges that they have not yet overcome within the traditional IT model while moving to the cloud era.  The need for security, frameworks, and more is consistent across both paradigms albeit with more fear around the cloud.  The real issue lies within the disruptive nature of cloud itself that threatens the very vendors that these enterprises have come to rely on for consultation and solutions. In reality, every business will need to ask themselves these questions prior to moving to the cloud.  Last year I advocated for an Enterprise Cloud Triage (ECT) to help enterprises determine their readiness for cloud.  This includes understanding the business objectives, people, an assessment of your current infrastructure, and exploring various doomsday scenarios. In any case, the number one thing an enterprise should NOT do is rush to the cloud or make arbitrary technology decisions that will impact them for years to come.

Learning new technologies like OpenStack, CloudStack, Puppet Labs, Chef, and more may be easy for the IT elite, but it's not quite that simple when you are managing 1000s of critical applications within today's always connected world.  For enterprises to be successful, they must include a viable strategy for their IT Operations to manage both legacy and cloud complexity.

This is exactly why the open source revolution is so powerful.  Why purchase a proprietary solution that requires an army of consultants to implement and maintain it when you can utilize modern and agile commercial open source solutions?  The key is the solution must be open enough to allow enterprises to take-on today's challenges with an eye to the future while being supportable and upgradeable.  The downside, is enterprises will need to step out of their comfort zone to implement solutions with new names like Zenoss, Opscode/Chef, Puppet Labs, Piston Cloud, and more.

To answer the question, I'd have to believe that Citrix has abandoned OpenStack which I don't believe is the case.  Citrix continues to contribute to OpenStack and they are the custodians of Xen.  With that said, CloudStack deserves the opportunity to become a top level open source project under the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).  Whatever happens in the future, I believe it's a brilliant move for Citrix and gives them a real chance to disrupt the cloud market.  However, simply moving to ASF doesn't guarantee success and Citrix has a lot of work to do to make the CloudStack project successful.  

On March 1, 2012, I wrote a blog post entitled, "Why Billion Dollar Red Hat and OpenStack Need to Dance", which broke all of Zenoss' blogging records.  The fact is, I understand why Red Hat originally rebuffed OpenStack but I'm thrilled that they were able to reconcile under the OpenStack Foundation.  Red Hat could not afford to lose the cloud to other rival Linux operating system vendors such as Canonical and they have an opportunity to create a commercial version for the enterprise that is fully supported and tested.

Now that the inevitability of Red Hat joining OpenStack is over, it's time for Red Hat to get to work and deliver a commercial version of OpenStack to the Enterprise. It's my opinion that this move will force a strategy shift within CloudForms as I doubt Red Hat will want to maintain multiple IaaS platforms.  However, OpenShift may be different a la VMware's Cloud Foundry whereby a PaaS solution doesn't necessarily need to conform to a single design paradigm.

Therefore, the real question is who will challenge Citrix's commercial offering with a viable commercial OpenStack solution. Today you have Piston Cloud, Nebula, Cloudscaling, and of course Rackspace with the eventuality of a Red Hat offering. These solutions will need to effectively compete against the likes of VMware vCloud and, even more interesting, Eucalyptus with their Amazon Web Services (AWS) relationship.