According to SoftLayer's announcement Tuesday, adding C3's capabilities will strengthen SoftLayer's automation and further the company's virtualization vision to transform the data center industry. Citrix's C3 product suite includes a complete set of service delivery infrastructure for cloud computing.

According to the announcement, the first component of the suite adopted by SoftLayer will be Citrix XenServer Cloud Edition, a server virtualization solution that enables customers to create virtual data center environments.

XenServer, powered by the Xen hypervisor includes an easy-to-use management console that, like Vmware and Microsoft's hypervisor products, can provision and manage any number of physical and virtual machines across a data center.

"Partnering with Citrix was an easy decision. It's clear they are listening to enterprises and cloud service providers -- these solutions meet and exceed the needs of this rapidly-evolving IT segment," Softlayer chief technology officer Nathan Day said in a statement. "The flexibility and scalability of Citrix XenServer allows us to deliver advanced virtualization today. And the full Citrix C3 solution will allow us to deliver the cloud computing of tomorrow."

Earlier this week, utility computing technology developer 3Tera (3tera.com) announced it would pair Citrix's C3 solution with 3Tera's AppLogic cloud computing platform to make enterprise-grade cloud solutions available in either external hosted clouds, or as a platform that can be deployed in corporate data centers behind customer firewalls. This would allow entire virtual data centers and applications to operate on the cloud.