Citrix acquired by private equity, will be paired with Tibco in $16.5bn deal
- Reference: 1643643591
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/01/31/citrix_acquired_by_private_equity/
- Source link:
Under the terms of the agreement announced today, Citrix shareholders will receive $104 per share, a price which represents a premium of 24 per cent over the over the closing price on December 20, the last trading day before rumours began to leak regarding a potential takeover.
Citrix also put out its financial results for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2021 today, reporting revenue of $851m compared to $810m for the same quarter in 2020, representing 5 per cent growth.
[1]
Citrix is one of the veterans of the IT industry, pioneering remote desktop access for applications hosted on Windows server in the 1990s, before expanding into other areas of the application delivery stack.
[2]
[3]
Vista and Evergreen have stated their intention to combine Citrix with Tibco Software, a business intelligence and enterprise data management firm, one of Vista's portfolio companies. However, Citrix will continue to operate under the Citrix name and brand.
Post-acquisition, the pair will be positioned to provide "complete, secure and optimised infrastructure for enterprise application and desktop delivery and data management to advance hybrid cloud IT strategies and meet the needs of the modern enterprise," according to a statement by the companies.
[4]
The interim CEO for Citrix Bob Calderoni claimed that as a private company, it will have increased financial and strategic flexibility to invest in high-growth opportunities such as desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and accelerate its ongoing cloud transition.
"Together with Tibco, we will be able to operate with greater scale and provide a larger customer base with a broader range of solutions to accelerate their digital transformations and enable them to deliver the future of hybrid work," he said.
Calderoni has been interim CEO [5]since October last year , when the previous incumbent David Henshall suddenly stepped aside from the role.
[6]Citrix has built a browser, and lost a CEO
[7]What do F5, Citrix, Pulse Secure all have in common? China exploiting their flaws to hack govt, biz – Feds
[8]Citrix preps ‘Project Bifrost’ to make cloud-to-cloud moves a rainbow ride
[9]Citrix must Wrike what it sees because it's buying project management outfit for $2.25bn
Tibco CEO Dan Streetman said that: "There has never been a better time to be in the business of connected intelligent analytics," and added that his firm was "thrilled to bring our industry-leading solutions to Citrix’s global customers."
Detailing the reasons for the acquisition, Vista managing director John Stalder explained that Citrix and Tibco provided mission-critical software and services to many the world's most successful businesses, and he saw value in combining their respective portfolios.
[10]
This time last year, [11]Citrix bought Wrike , a project management and team-based collaboration tool, for $2.25bn. Vista was the seller in that deal.
"Both businesses have now completed transitions to approximately 90 percent recurring revenue, poising the go-forward combined business to drive future growth," Stalder purred.
The transaction has apparently been unanimously approved by members of the Citrix board of directors, and is expected to close mid-year. ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YfgVtz3MeBbefPN@M@G1HgAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfgVtz3MeBbefPN@M@G1HgAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfgVtz3MeBbefPN@M@G1HgAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YfgVtz3MeBbefPN@M@G1HgAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/citrix_launches_browser_loses_ceo/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/citrix_launches_browser_loses_ceo/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/chinas_hackers_f5_citrix/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/16/citrix_project_bifrost_project_shield/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/19/citrix_wrike_acquisition/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YfgVtz3MeBbefPN@M@G1HgAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/19/citrix_wrike_acquisition/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Review the market.
Indeed.
Colour me cynical, but this sort of thing rarely (ever?) goes well for the users.
That said, lets see what the employees do; if they start to jump ship, we will know where this is heading.
Well goodbye Citrix. It was nice working with you all these years but that's probably the final nail in your coffin.
Tibco
Tibco have such a confusing range of overlapping products that one more won't make much difference!
I've not seen much of Citrix in the last few year. More of the VMWare Horizon stuff. Anybody out there working in this area got any thoughts?
Re: Tibco
I've worked with them a lot over the years albeit last time was last year.
As it's been for any number of years, it's been tricky to pitch where they sit and it feels that everything you can do with Citrix you can do much cheaper with other products/natively within e.g. Windows Server.
The one ever-outstanding product of course was NetScaler. They got in early when they bought that product line and they're still an outstanding product but for most places a la everything Citrix, they are crazily expensive and gain more complexity with every release.
They lost their way with virtualisation - XenServer was always a good offering but lacked a lot of Enterprise features that customers were used to having, even in free products. They broke some interesting ground about 6/7 years ago with XenClient - I loved that. A bare metal hypervisor for laptops/desktops and switching between them with keyboard combos. Much more graceful than any type-2 hypervisors and great for those of us working with different customers.
It's felt like their decline has been a very long and slow one but I suspect we will soon see more redundancies and chunks of IP being sold off.
Time for their customers to review the market.