Thread regarding Citrix Systems Inc. layoffs

As an old product category with a declining installed base, Netscaler has a future as a cash cow that can be milked by raising prices for the remaining customers. Over time, they will find other lower-cost solutions and dump this obsolete product line.

The best time to revive Netscaler has been and gone. Today, the best bet is to raise upgrade prices as much as possible. Grab more high-profit revenue, from inept customers, while it lasts.

Yup, 2015 was when Klaus and Rajiv were the leaders and the leaders that worked for them were all solid. After the arrival of the Russian, the org structure changed to PJ/Jeroen duo and its been downhill ever since.

The other reality is that the market evolved, pushing NS to be the tool for the top end of the market. NS was slow in going to cloud, slow in offering true cloud managed services.

Mid-range customers started using NGINX or AVI, or just used the native, much easier to use LBs in the cloud, with built-in auto-scaling and much deeper integration.

Is NS revenue growing or flat? Is NS adding customers, or not.. I would venture to guess that revenue is flat-ish, and most likely, customer count is declining.

Quite a few massive companies use Netscaler, you just don't know about it. Most of all the activities you do online go through a Netscaler. But like you said, no one would ever consider a Netscaler, right...

The time for that was when Klaus and Rajiv were at the helm.

In 2015, a separate NetScaler would have been interesting. Full sales team, existing top customers, a good leader, would have made for a strong app networking company. But when the going was good, Citrix's attempts to part with it never made it to the finish line.

Now, the NetScaler lost its mojo. It didn't make the major shift to security, the cloud management play is late, thought leadership is gone, customers are still using it but are they finding new use cases? not really....

The cloud applications is where the volume of usage is, and NS does not play well there. Yes, there is a class of customers who run their own data centers and F5, NS, VMV-AVI all duke it out. So, that's not a large growth area.

As a cash cow for the remaining high end customers, its home in CSG now, or a similar home in the future is what will likely happen. As a standalone, it will still be run very tightly, with limited R&D since the market for the NS portfolio is not really a growth market today. If there is a shift like F5 did, then maybe... That's been tried many a times by the now JV leadership team so, maybe one more time will do the trick.

No CXO would bother considering a Netscaler for any purpose with or without the Citrix name. It's a product long since been in an identity crisis. What actually is a Netscaler these days? What isn't it? I one one thing it is for sure, a product I'd never buy.