Been out of the loop for a while - was one of the TIBCO employees that was let go early. But while I was still there, the management was touting that CSG was going to be this "acquisition machine" that would gobble up companies fast and furious. What happened? Has CSG acquired any companies?
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What about Informatica? They let that one go.
By the way talking about acquisition it looks like Eliott Management is working on something… I don’t think this would impact CSG but never know ,,,
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/elliott-builds-15-billion-stake-hewlett-packard-enterprise-bloomberg-reports-2025-04-15/
There are 2 kinds of growth:
- Internal growth: get more and more customers. Clearly not the current strategy: marketing and sales gutted, service externalized, no support, no education. Nada.
- External growth: acquisitions.
There are 2 problems with acquisitions. First, you know what you get, you don't know what you loose.
What is the capital and main asset of a software company ?
- Brainpower. You are not buying factories or shops, or machines or trains, or mines or trucks. You buy knowledge and experience. If your best engineers, consultants and other techs leave, you bought an empty shell. Money for nothing.
- Customer base. You buy a portfolio of customers to whom you expect to sell your other solutions.
CSG has been dismissing and outsourcing constantly, to replace highly technical people and years of experience, with new people in far countries and lowest salaries possible. And the current strategy is to externalize small and medium customers to partners. Adding more customers or brainpower through an acquisition is clearly not a current objective.
And there comes the second problem: external growth through acquisitions works only if you build synergy. If not, you are assembling "a bunch of unrelated products and not investing in a cohesive user experience."
It's not from me, I'm citing Forrester there https://www.forrester.com/blogs/boomi-dismembers-the-tibco-frankenstein/
When Citrix was merged with Tibco, I was thinking: basically (very basically), Citrix is (virtual) hardware, and Tibco is software. Is there a project here to build some kind of a workstation? With tools so that any user can easily access any data, virtualized from any source, and build and share dashboards and analysis from these data, or even design and integrate their own processes to be deployed easily and running automatically into containers in the cloud?
I was not sure if that was the case, or if there was a market for that, even supposing that it would have been technically possible. But I was expecting that there was someone with a vision behind the merge.
How stupidly ingenuous I was. Reality has shown us that it was strictly a financial operation. No vision.
Would it be possible to see some change in the future? You mean, an innovative and inventive strategy, not just playing chainsaw massacre?
That would be a complete switch of direction, of the magnitude of an earthquake. An earthquake, yes: because it cannot be TK leading such a change.
Completely different karma. He would have to be departed and replaced.
« I doubt that there is still money to invest in future acquisitions. «
This is true that CSG still has a lot of debt but it is now in much better position than it was 2 years ago and one point also is that for a large acquisition Vista and Eliot would very likely be involved. Future will tell
If I remember well, these were not very expensive acquisitions. But I might be wrong as I can't find anymore any information about the price
https://tracxn.com/d/acquisitions/acquisitions-by-citrix/__QRqd8Qc8WAhhZNc4vzfzuSrXp-pd-GKUA4Z0ODfem_c#news
And when announced, I had the feeling that it might have been in response of the bad publicity caused by security breaches, as these two companies are providing solutions in that domain.
You might keep some big customers even if they are unhappy with increased maintenance costs and bad support. But everybody will run if vulnerabilities are discovered. No partner will promote the solution, and even big customers would accelerate a migration to other platforms.
Also, the debt is so huge - I really wonder if CSG's profits can cover its costs - that I doubt that there is still money to invest in future acquisitions.
And the "hatchet" strategy predominant until now has been to cut as most as possible, not to add more size.
I may be wrong, but I would be surprised if there are large acquisition in the future.
So far only a few small companies have been acquired and they have been integrated in the Citrix BU. That said it is my understanding that CSG management is still planning to make large acquisitions in mid long term perspective. I think it is a matter of finding the right opportunity at the right price.
You have details about recent Citrix acquisitions below:
https://www.citrix.com/news/announcements/jan-2025/citrix-announces-acquisition-of-unicon.html
https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/key-acquisition-of-strong-network-to-strengthen-citrix