Citrix is dead. It started to die in 2009 when Mark Templeton just decided to lay off 10% of employees before the Great Recession hit in an attempt to recoup some stock value.
Citrix could have resurrected itself in 2012 when XenApp and XenDesktop 7.0 was released. They could have embraced the pre-cloud ASP crowd and they could have switched to subscription licensing, but didn’t. Instead, spend the next 5-6 years rebuilding a dying product to have all the features lost along the way. Yes it took that long for the 7.x series under FMA to achieve feature parity with XenApp 6.5 under IMA. An eternity and that’s what did it.
The money in Cloud is made providing compute, network, and storage. Everything else is lower-margin stuff and with the advance of applications hosted in cloud, who needs a desktop? Not as many people.
At CSG/Citrix, we use lots of cloud-based apps without having to use VDI or even NetScaler. Think about it: CRMs, email, VoIP. Is SalesForce, Zoom, Outlook or GMail run from your local browser any different than running it from inside an ICA session? No, it’s not.
The Citrix product is good when you have specific needs and need to have those resources in a fenced-in environment- be it cloud or On-Prem.
So, after years or just cruising and not innovating, Citrix became a sick and vulnerable company. Instead of being able to drive off these parasites, the parasites (Elliot) took over.
The Kirill/Calderoni/Henschall period was devoted to trying to appease and drive off the parasites. Innovation and setting the direction was unattainable let alone any sort of priority.
2017 - the “liberation” of our foreign-held monies. What did we do with money? Oh yeah, stock buybacks to try to buy off Elliot, we gave ourselves bonuses, and we used $2.5bn to buy Wrike. No R&D and no innovation. We didn’t even hire more Devs, more Support, etc. Instead we gave the Vista parasite a way in by buying Wrike.
So riddle me this: if we don’t own the primary revenue-generators of Cloud (compute, network, and storage), if we are not a Security Company, if VDI is becoming less relevant as apps have moved into the Cloud, then what do the CVAD, NetScaler, Sharefile BUs have to offer?
One last question: where is money to innovate coming from? The loan secured to buy out Citrix ($16bn) didn’t have money left over for restructuring or reinvestment. So what money is going to be used for R&D and innovation? The recent layoffs only saved $500M which probably covers the cost of the layoff itself, but that loan needs to be paid off.
To conclude: Citrix will not change the world. The world has passed Citrix by. The money and resources do no exist for significant investment to revolutionize anything. The reason why we’ve heard nothing from management is because THERE IS NO PLAN that attains the goals TK write about on the CSG page on Jan11.
What what they do and not what they say or write. The plan is a financial one. The CEO is a finance guy. There is no grand tech plan. He’s here for the next year or two to make the company profitable and to make a name for himself to go on to the next CEO gig.
TK will be replaced by another up-and-comer, and another, and another. Vista is not going to be looking for anyone with a grandiose vision of the future trailblazer by Citrix and there are only so many Steve Job-like people in this world. And even if we found the Second-Coming-of-Steve, where’s the tech gulf he can fill? Where is his Woz?