Cloud Computing and Virtualization Company Citrix To Be Acquired for $16.5B

Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal is valued at $16.5 billion, representing a near 30 percent premium on Citrix's market capitalization before rumors of a possible deal first started to emerge last month. Founded in 1989, Citrix was originally known for its Windows-based remote access products, but over the past few decades the company has evolved endeavored to move with the times, and now offers myriad technologies spanning cloud computing, servers, networking, and more.

Value

[DarkOx]

Does Citrix do anything useful today?

I mean what was their last real innovation? Win-frame in the late 90s? Does not Microsoft's native terminal server tools offer everything presentation manger does for the most part now?

I know some things like Netscaler are popular but I don't see anything there other than some (rather badly implemented under the hood given the vulns in the past ) UI stuff on top of FOSS tools - anyone can knock that off that wants to and has.

Oh then there is Zen which is the also ran of the virtualization world, and again mostly lipstick on FOSS stuff, largely developed outside the company.

Is anyone both using a Citrix product at his point AND planning to stay with them roadmap-wise? If so what and why?

Re:Value

[chipperdog]

If I remember correctly, MS licensed a bunch of the WinFrame code to create RDP, I wonder if Citrix is still getting recurring licensing payments from MS?

Re:

[LodCrappo]

It was a symbiotic relationship... Microsoft gave Citrix access to operations system source code so that they could create remote access products and even invested $ in Citrix in the early days. Citrix gave MS the foundations of RDP and they always seemed to cooperate so that Citrix's products would have new features for a few years before they ended up in MS products.

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[EvilSS]

It was a symbiotic relationship...

Yep, although it's one that started basically at gunpoint. Back in the day, Citrix licensed the NT source code for NT 3.x from Microsoft. They built their Winframe product on top of this, and sold it as a complete package, OS and all. When NT 4 came along, they had access to the source code, and started down the road of doing the same thing. When they were just about done, MS was like "Whoa there, your license only covers 3.x, not 4.x. If you release that, we're going to sue you. But, seeing as we are such

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[Ostracus]

Well move further down the stack to the smaller businesses and SOHOs. Virtualization has always been seen as the "big boys" technology even through most computers come with it. The scale is just smaller.

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[mobby_6kl]

They now have an HTML5 client which is nifty since you can use it from anywhere even if you can't/don't want to install the software/

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[frith01]

Citrix allows us to use any client (linux / iphone / android tablet) to run our windows only applications. We wont need to upgrade the hardware for our workstations for quite some time.

Anything that helps reduce the Microsoft leash is a good thing.

Re:Value

[slack_justyb]

Does Citrix do anything useful today?

They're deployed in quite a few healthcare, banking, and government entities.

I mean what was their last real innovation?

I mean nothing really, but that I think is beside the point. Their systems are pretty tightly integrated into some of their core customers to the point that none of them are leaving anytime soon. I think we all tend to forget that a lot of "modern day" value in a company isn't what's new but what your tendrils are attached to. Now the pros and cons of that kind of marketing/business model I leave as a completely different debate. But as entrenched as Citrix is in some really important companies, they have a lot of value for the definition that a stock broker would use for that word value.

Does not Microsoft's native terminal server tools offer everything presentation manger does for the most part now?

I mean yeah, but not really. The MS services "get the job done". The Citrix stuff offers other accelerated stuff for multimedia and handles high latent networks a bit better. Also on the admin side setting up load balancing on Citrix is smoother than MS TS, but you absolutely can get the same thing, eventually. That said, don't pay the Citrix price tag for any of that. With enough elbow grease, you can get MS TS to be pretty darn close to Citrix offerings minus all their specialized multimedia acceleration stuff. But if you do not have the time to do all of that and you've already got a toe in the Citrix stuff, just do the Citrix stuff.

anyone can knock that off that wants to and has

Absolutely. And if that's your tea, then fuck Citrix. However, if you've got an CITO that's looking at paper contracts for support, the FOSS stuff is going to not really ping on their radar. YMMV.

Is anyone both using a Citrix product at his point AND planning to stay with them roadmap-wise? If so what and why?

I came from a company that was using them and it was basically a "we've always used it" kind of mentality. And from what I can gather, that's a lot of their core customers. I'm far from someone who'd cheer on Citrix, but gosh darn, I'd be a fool to not admit that "boy oh boy, do they have their users hooked to their brand of cocaine." So I think the majority argument is, "why change" when we talk about Citrix customers. Sort of like Oracle customers to an extent.

Re:

[DarkOx]

Thanks for the update. It sounds to me like Citrix is in about the same place I stopped paying attention back in 2008 or so. You are spot on about the value proposition in terms of continuing revenue but putting my stock broker hat on I continue to worry about growth.

My anyone can knock that off argument around netscaler was not so much you can replace it with some firewall scripts on Ubuntu but that Cisco/PaloAlto/Juniper/... can toss together competing products (mostly already do) in the space with damn

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[EvilSS]

My anyone can knock that off argument around netscaler was not so much you can replace it with some firewall scripts on Ubuntu but that Cisco/PaloAlto/Juniper/... can toss together competing products (mostly already do) in the space with damn near $0 R&D

Cisco, at least, doesn't seem to want to. When they discontinued their ACE line, they recommended Netscaler as a replacement to their customers. F5 seems is really the only major competitor to Netscaler right now.

Re:

[The-Ixian]

CCEA was my first big technical certification back in the Metaframe XP days.

Since then, I have seen MS continually eat away the need for the Metaframe middleware in larger and larger markets.

Today, I wouldn't even consider using Citrix's Metaframe (or whatever it's called these days) product outside of a very large terminal farm.

ObCorrection

[jd]

Xen.

Zen is a type of Buddhism from Japan or the name of The Liberator's computer on the TV show Blake's 7.

If Citrix produced The Liberator, complete with teleport, self-regenerating systems and strong AI computer, I'd not be complaining about innovation!

Re:

[DarkOx]

Hehe, I'll have a little fun with my homophone mishap here too. - If Citrix had a product that would let everyone reach enlightenment I'd also give them some high marks for innovation!

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[r1348]

Their NetScaler load balancer series was used in all datacenters I worked in.

Re:

[theCoder]

I don't know about other people, but I usually have multiple Citrix sessions open every day, on various networks. There's connecting to work from home (the Citrix VDI is much more stable/reliable than the VPN), connecting to a Windows desktop from Linux (though with Skype meetings going away at $WORK in a couple months in favor of only Teams, that need will decrease), and connecting to different networks through firewalls.

In general, Citrix "just works", and is pretty easy to use, at least from the end use

So in other words...

[Kokuyo]

...no matter how annoying the software was so far, it's gonna get a whole lot worse now?

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[gweihir]

...no matter how annoying the software was so far, it's gonna get a whole lot worse now?

Look at what MS did with the Windows and Office GUIs. This stuff used to have reasonable usability. Not anymore. It is like they are now a bureaucracy that thrives on wasting user time and inflicting pain on its users.

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[Osgeld]

gawd, you still beating that dead horse

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[The-Ixian]

Well... maybe they will stop renaming their entire product suite something completely different every few years.

Yes, that's hyperbole, but I swear, every time I go to use some Citrix thing I have to learn the new names for things and map them on to the names I used to know them as.... it's very annoying.

Re:

[whoever57]

It's going to be loaded up with debt, strip mined for any possible value, chunks sold off and the remainder shut down.

Al Citrix employees needs to be looking for new jobs right now.

Citrix has value?

[gweihir]

I only know their stuff from it causing problems. Far, far inferior to a simple x-forwarding which has been free basically since forever.

But I guess in the MS "ecosystem" you have to pay for inferior solutions.

Re:

[chipperdog]

In the mid-1990s MS licensed a bunch of Winframe stuff to create RDP...Not sure if they are still getting recurring licensing fees from MS or not.

Re:

[clovis]

keep spamming your inane comment, someone will mod you up! Moron.

Chipper is basically correct. Here is what Microsoft said in 1997:
https://news.microsoft.com/199... [microsoft.com]

WTF is going on with the "Flabby Boohoo" account.
Almost every post is a few words like "Fuck off, dipshit", and appears to be applied random posts that aren't actually stupid.

Re:

[KlomDark]

X-forwarding is bandwidth heavy, no thanks.

Re:

[DarkOx]

bandwidth and usability issues aside, the 'kill-app for winframe/presentation server/metaframe XP whatever they were calling it whatever week for business was always printing!

You could use a published application click print and have it spit out on a printer reasonably close where where you were with mostly correct document processing / driver issues handled. My recollection is MS-Terminal Services of the era never really offered a solution here that was anywhere close end user transparent, and lets not eve

Re:

[EvilSS]

Great for the user, but a nightmare for the admins. From causing the Citrix servers to BSOD (0x7D stop codes in NT4 TSE, I was on the project where this issue was first discovered by Citrix/Microsoft while working on a ticket for us back in the very early Metaframe 1.0 days. It persisted up until server 2003 and changes to the print driver architecture in Windows) to bandwidth issues (I'm convinced PCL is actually a logarithmic scale, with a 10x increase in print size in each new version) to driver compatib

Re:

[gweihir]

and lets not even speak about printing on UNIX/Linux, unless its just text that is mostly a shit-show even for locally attached situations today!

Seriously? I must have missed that problem. Ever ever of PostScript?