I am not looking forward to the downward trajectory of this company, but it will be interesting to watch from a distance how all this will look in a few years.
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The best thing that could ever happen to NetScaler is to free itself of Citrix. It's actually a very good and capable product with potential under the right leadership but it never had a chance to actually compete since it was always associated with being a proprietary arm of the Citrix VDI stack. So many CxO's wouldn't even entertain a NetScaler discussion for purely networking due to the Citrix brand so hopefully that changes. Hopefully there's still some decent PM to innovate its way to being viable or it will go the way of the dodo bird.
16b in debt to service seems unlikely to get reduced significantly by selling off netscalar and sharefile, but then again the whole deal is an entangled mess of PE self dealing, so my guess is that an effectively bankrupt CSG will avoid the public scrutiny of an actual corporate bankruptcy proceeding.
Cloud native LBs have limited functionality and don't do anything for on-prem workloads. There will be a market for NetScaler, F5 and the rest for years to come. Most NetScaler sales are VPX at this point anyways, so if anything, hardware will get phased out. That's why they're getting down to just two hardware boxes to sell. The low-end (5900) is mostly gone to VPXs already and for the relatively few customers buying high-end (26000) they will go with clustered or a 2-tier setup with the 15k replacement.
My guess is that Microsoft will consume all Citrix DaaS customers when their current subscriptions expire in 2-3 years. Cloud native load balancers will replace NetScalers somewhere in the future.
I'm interested on what happens when they sell off the BU's. How much synergy will be lost when NetScaler and Citrix (CVAD) split.
What are we going to tell customers when they call in for a NetScaler issue that is so incredibly integrated with CVAD? "Sorry go call Citrix support for that"?
I don't see how it maintains it's market position without being so closely integrated with each other. The combination was greater then the sum of it's parts.