It doesn’t matter now but when was the beginning of the end? Some
Say lack of innovation. Others say culture went downhill after Mark T left. Others say Calderoni coming aboard and bringing in the SAP mafia with him (COO Schmitz is one example). Was it one thing or all of these? Or none? Futures change when many seemingly little things happen in a particular sequence.
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"So do you think if Citrix moved XenDesktop to the cloud earlier to get a first mover advantage the outcome may have been different? Are you saying that with so many SaaS companies offering cloud based solutions XenApp or any kind of app virtualization was no longer needed except for legacy apps and without further innovation Citrix is where it is?"
Citrix mis-executed on several opportunities:
- The cloud movement for XenDesktop: Missed the move, giving Msft and AWS a chance to catch up. This was a chance to extend the leadership position by 4-7 years. Now, there are so many different ways to replace Citrix, its funny. An earlier shift would have given the company runway to work on the next wave much earlier
- Offering value in SaaS: Citrix had the opportunity to be in Identity (a la Okta), cloud security services (SASE--> SSE) (a la ZScaler, NetScope, others) through an acquisition. Way before it spent $2B on Wrike, it could have picked up one or more assets in this space, which would have given it a new way to approach enterprise/user security. But, the ELT could not grok this and anyone after Mark T did not have the vision to push for such a large change.
Citrix thought they had a plan 3 years ago- Intelligent Workspace. Well, look how d-mb that turned out to be. The whole Intelligent workspace concept completely missed the fact that Microsoft is not going to relinquish the desktop to a tool like Workspace that is attempting to take over the overall user interaction. And that the workflows they touted, like showing your PTO balance etc, did not solve any real-world problems- they were gimmicks. Citrix re-positioned to this way before there was any real vetting of the value proposition, and then had to eat crow when the story fizzled.
VDI will remain useful for fewer and fewer use cases and Citrix never built a plan for anything more. They are pitching DaaS as the replacement, again missing the point. Why is there a need for DaaS? 1% use cases is cloud-PC. The remainder is third party access (like contractors, call centers) and the legacy use cases of EPIC, Cerner etc for highly regulated industries, which is where bulk of the revenue is coming from. The third-party and regulated use cases will diminish, each time the regulated apps move to proper SaaS and managed browser solutions like Chrome Enterprise or others, or upstarts that are launching with the same concept will punch the last nails in the coffin for Citrix.
So do you think if Citrix moved XenDesktop to the cloud earlier to get a first mover advantage the outcome may have been different? Are you saying that with so many SaaS companies offering cloud based solutions XenApp or any kind of app virtualization was no longer needed except for legacy apps and without further innovation Citrix is where it is?
Major milestones on Citrix's downward spiral:
- Mark T's last year: He has some personal problems, clouding his involvement and taking the eye off the ball around XenDesktop moving to cloud (like project Avalon), and making sure Citrix has a story for SaaS
- Crazy Russian Kirill- good ideas, very poorly executed. No sense to run a company of this size from a culture perspective. Too much in the weeds. At the end, ousted because he wanted to invest to grow, while Elliott did not want to drop the stock price during the inevitable dip from on-prem to cloud/subscription.
- Henshall- no clue about strategy, keeping people accountable. Listening to Tim and PJ, then people like Sridhar, without seeing what customers are actually doing. If you were a fly on the wall with any large customer interaction, you would hear that they are just maintaining XenDesktop while moving to other services for their users. There were practically no new Workspace customers and very small amount of Netscaler customers in the last 3-4 years! Just look at press releases? Same customers repeated every 2-3 years. Can you imagine a business with no new customers? Only customers that are renewing or a handful jumping ship from VMWare? That signal was routinely ignored for those who wanted to preserve their roles while the company was weakening by the minute.
A real Chief Product Officer will set strategy and show why it will make a difference. All PJ cared about was going to Formula 1 races. Did you ever see a real strategic presentation from PJ? Tim, who claimed the role of Business Strategy was anything but. He has zero clue about the business, zero. Did you ever see a truly impactful presentation from Tim? None and None, for 3+ years.
Then there is Wrike.... A masterful way to spend $2B with something so out of alignment with Citrix core. They could not even explain why they did it, except for the fact that it allows them to hide the lack of growth on Workspace subscription revenue for a few quarters. That's a $2B folly.
It is amazing the the company actually survived for so long. This is only because certain customers just could not seem to replace XenDesktop. But that is also changing with Microsoft's aggressive push. The rate of decline will accelerate. And now there is far less money in the bank to do anything meaningful. So merged with Tibco, the assets will be put into a blender, with some muck coming out that will be so commingled that no one will know where the cash flows are. The end result will be some cash flow company that Vista and Elliott will milk and then sell to some other large warehouse of legacy software.
Somewhere between X1 and X5 when Mark got carried away thinking he is second coming of Steve Jobs. Bad acquisitions, X5 ended up a flop, layoffs followed, some aimless floundering, eventually Elliott came in, kicked Mark out. David is more of the same but on the smaller scale - bad acquisitions, Strategy 2020 ended up a flop, Elliott came in, kicked David out
Agree on the product renaming. Many technologists came to identify themselves with our products and wore that as a badge of honor. Then we made them super generic. I think that's more on Tim as head of Marketing. Sure, David could have blocked it, but I think Tim and his team bear a significant responsibility
I agree with a lot that’s already been said, but I’d also have to single out Henshall. Just colossal missteps at every stage on his part. The complete rebranding of the products was unnecessary and a costly mistake, the lack of product innovation, an over investment to Workspace, and then the icing on the cake — Wrike… that’s entirely on him. Great guy. Nice fella. Horrible leader and CEO.
So many things! After Mark T left was definitely it. After Mark left there was no innovation, culture got bad and the acquisitions were awful. I think the Wrike acquisition was the worst decision! It caused so many layoffs. Why did normal people see it wasn’t a good idea but leadership didn’t see it. I wonder why they spent so much energy and time on changing the Citrix logo instead of increasing sales and innovation. It is like the leadership team don’t get it. They don’t have common sense. Time, energy and money were spent on the wrong things.
Cant say when the bad started, but the nail in the coffin for me it was the acquisition of Wrike. Right to that point things were looking up, some coworkers were getting pay adjustments and we were hiring. After that 2.4 billion deal, we entered a hiring freeze, no more spending or investing, and every single team started to get overloaded.
+1 for "culture went downhill after Mark T left". Especially changes in hiring and promotions. In my department, when a managerial spot opened up, it used to seem like 80% of the time it would go to an internal candidate. Shortly after Mark T left, it seemed like 80% of the time it went to an outsider. I would love to see someone from HR post those numbers.