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Citrix Spinning Off GoTo Collaboration Business, Laying Off 1,000 People (cio.com) 43

itwbennett writes: In addition to the decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company, the initial results of Citrix's operations review, also involves a 'realignment of resources' that is expected to eliminate about 1,000 full-time and contract roles, over and above the effect of spinning off the GoTo business. Most of the layoffs and refocusing of resources are expected in November and in January 2016.
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Citrix Spinning Off GoTo Collaboration Business, Laying Off 1,000 People

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  • by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Thursday November 19, 2015 @12:45AM (#50960483)

    And later they will need 1000 H1B's and say we can't find us workers.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      They will want someone who can code in Java, C#, python, PHP, ruby, Go, Erlang, Fortran, HTML5, perl, COBOL, AngularJS with 10+ years experience in each, and fluent in English, Mandarin, and Russian with an MIS degree. Pays $60k

  • Everybody loves getting to spend extra time with the family during the Christmas holidays. And January is always a great time to start looking for a new job.

    Any bets on what percentage of their yearly salary the top ten executives at Citrix will get for coming up with this idea of 'realignment of resources'? Over or under 100%?

    • Ok, serious question. Is there ever a situation in your (anyone here) mind where laying off a bunch of people is the correct decision?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Ok, serious question. Is there ever a situation in your (anyone here) mind where laying off a bunch of people is the correct decision?

        If they are lawyers, accountants, or MBAs?

      • by Anrego ( 830717 ) *

        Off the top of my head:

        When a company is getting out of a line of business and no longer needs the skills those people brought.
        When a project downscales and there's nothing new for everyone to do.
        When a company looks at their workforce and realizes they've got too many of one skillset and not enough of another.

        There are legit reasons, but often it's about firing your skilled local (and more expensive) workforce and bringing in cheaper replacements. Shuffle everything around under the guise of a "restructuri

      • Ok, serious question. Is there ever a situation in your (anyone here) mind where laying off a bunch of people is the correct decision?

        Yeah. If the company is exiting the market in question and the laid off workers skills will no longer be needed, period. As opposed to laying off 1000 workers here and hiring 10,000 in India/China/________

  • tut! (Score:2, Informative)

    by edittard ( 805475 )

    Why is there a comma after review?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by davester666 ( 731373 )

      samzenpus is desperate to get in contact with you, but you are refusing his advances. He knew you would fall for his stupid editing errors.

    • It's a dependent clause.

      The "also" applies to "the decision", as opposed to "the initial results".

      The sentence is quite the run-on, and it's awkwardly constructed; however, it's grammatically correct.

      A less awkward construction would be:

      "Citrix's operations review initially resulted in a decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company. In addition, it has also motivated a decision to institute a euphemistic (in the opinion of the editors of CIO.com) 'realignment of resource

      • It's a dependent clause.

        No, it's not.

        The "also" applies to "the decision", as opposed to "the initial results".

        No, it doesn't.

        The sentence is quite the run-on, and it's awkwardly constructed; however, it's grammatically correct.

        No, it's not.

        Stop trying to put lipstick on a pig, willya?

        • Dependent Clause: In linguistics, a dependent clause (or a subordinate clause) is a clause that provides an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses either modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by ArcadeNut ( 85398 )

      Because, it, was, actually, submitted, by, William, Shatner...

  • one different release version of the GoToMeeting app per week per person, it's probably not a significant loss. I can do with as few as, say, 52 different instances of the same app on my machine. I don't need 152, or 1,052.

  • by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Thursday November 19, 2015 @01:28AM (#50960545) Homepage Journal
    I thought they mostly made a living by conning clueless CIOs into buying their OS/2-Era dumb-terminal technology and selling some shoddy VOIP product that one of their interns coded up in between coffee runs. Seems like the only time I hear "We're moving to Citrix," the company is well past coughing up blood and is about to be acquired by VCs and be gutted for its intellectual property.
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Don't forget Citrix Xen, the shoddiest commercial repackaging of a freeware technology that I've ever seen. Windows-only management for a Linux based virtualization technology? What were these monkeys *thinking*?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 19, 2015 @01:59AM (#50960609)

    It seems like Citrix was frequently attempting to upsell anyone that would listen on how GoToMeeting was the solution to every problem. Instead, it completely derailed an evaluation Citrix CloudPlatform.

    We had asked for a cloud control panel and hypervisor system based around Linux and Citrix assured us they had strong experience in that area. What I found was that the Citrix CloudPlatform product seemed half-baked where even stepping through the quick-start setup guide resulted in a log full of java null pointer exceptions and didn't function correctly for activating VMs.

    Then the Senior Sales Engineer of Citrix Cloud Platform lets me know this is a great time to show how Citrix GoToMeeting could save the day! He demanded I go to a GoToMeeting invite to have them show I was only a couple clicks away from having everything I could ever want from CloudPlatform (but couldn't just tell me where in the documentation or knowledgebase I could just find those couple clicks myself). At that point I pointed out that GoToMeeting wouldn't work on my GNU/Linux desktop which resulted in a condescending reply of "we usually do this from a Windows machine (like your desktop) where you run the GTM viewer."

    So, I got to re-iterate to the Senior Sales Engineer of Citrix Cloud Platform that I really do know what OS my desktop is running and it isn't Microsoft Windows. I also found out that basic GNU/Linux skills such as using SSH public/private key authentication or multi-user use of GNU Screen. So, instead we spent the rest of the week discussing how there was no plan for Citrix to port GoToMeeting to Linux. Once they finally stopped being condescending pricks pushing that Windows can be the only true desktop and that they would be willing to support Citrix Cloud Platform without having to run Windows, the evaluation had completely derailed.

    In retrospect, it is really scary we even considered a company with such poor GNU/Linux skills and support for a complex cloud configuration based around GNU/Linux. But I'm glad they are now considering getting some focus.

    • by dvdungeon ( 761065 ) on Thursday November 19, 2015 @06:05AM (#50961019)
      Sadly, Linux support has been something Citrix engineering has pushed for (and has had working internal demos) for years, but it's repeatedly blocked for political reasons (Citrix is in bed with MS and incredibly gutless when it comes to anything it perceives as even slightly risking that relationship). Cloud Platforms other issue is lack of engineering resources. It simply doesn't have enough dev/qa for the task at hand, and the product quality shows this.
  • Maybe they bought VMware desktop and found that they could reduce headcount by having fewer people manage the hardware. (Ducks.)

    Actually, I'm only half-kidding here because I once saw a guy sell whitebox computers to NEC technologies (when they made and sold their own computers) and I had the wonderful experience myself of selling storage technology to EMC (when they had, well you know).

  • by tresstatus ( 260408 ) on Thursday November 19, 2015 @09:01AM (#50961683)
    I've worked on citrix for several years starting with 4.0 metaframe. The concept of what citrix WANTS to do is good. Every version that comes out is supposed to be better and better, yet the same old problems plague citrix, like printer issues. Every version that comes out renames the management consoles and other featuers/settings within them. To me, it appears that people are just changing things for the sake of changing them or for it to appear like something new and different is happening, but the things that they should be changing never get changed. Citrix has acquired numerous companies over the years and never really integrated them into a unified management console, so you wind up with a minimum of 3 unique consoles that aren't intertwined and sometimes don't even talk to each other. This frustrates the admins/engineers that have to work on citrix. Citrix should be working to keep these people as happy as possible, because in reality the admins and engineers are really the only cheerleaders for Citrix. Go talk to some users, ANY USERS. most of them HATE using citrix.
    • We've moved to Citrix for a lot of our applications. It works, and is a lot better than the alternative. The applications we have moved to Citrix are ALL old legacy applications that are too expensive to replace. So it is essentially a stopgap solution to keep limping along until we can eventually phase them out. In an ideal world we wouldn't use it, in an ideal world we would have planned for and budgeted for replacements. I rarely if ever see an ideal world however.

      You're right, users hate it, however the

  • One problem with Citrix is that their cash cow, XenApp, is getting less relevant. They have a huge presence in health care and other sectors where they can't assure endpoint security, have lots of shared machines/terminals, and have a lot of regulatory compliance issues. However, Microsoft keeps improving RemoteApp which can be had for the price of a CAL rather than a CAL plus Citrix seat. In addition, more applications are migrating to browser-based HTML5 type systems that don't require weird client-side p

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