Citrix really needs to get its act together, and soon In the frenetic run-up to VMworld, it's easy to forget anything else exists in the tech world at all except VMware and its orbiting ecosystem. Cutting through the acquisition rumours and flurry of meaningless minor-version bumps by startups, big things are happening and need consideration. With that in mind, let's talk about …
For netscaler. Couldn't care less about VDI myself. I don't think I've even spoken to anyone that has deployed VDI, perhaps because I don't deal in internal IT, not sure.
Citrix has for a long time been very honest that Xen is not as good as VMware, and I've always admired that about them. They will push Xen if cost is really a factor.
Elliot consider netscaler to be a non core business, and want Citrix to spin it out.
Not sure how that will play out, a lot of the netscaler sales are based on hard sells to get netscaler into Citrix environments, and leveraging existing customers relationships to sell netscaler for more general ADC requirements.
Question is, without these sales, do they have enough revenue to spend enough in r&d to stay the number 2 in a profitable and highly contended market.
First, I agree that NetScaler remains best of breed. Spinning off that business (as Elliot Mgmt has recommended) doesn't make sense in that case.
With respect to your comment, "Citrix has for a long time been very honest that Xen is not as good as VMware," however, I respectfully disagree. I think you may be confusing the Citrix's hypervisor product (XenServer, which plays third fiddle to ESX and Hyper-V, a fact that Citrix makes no attempt to hide) with their VDI & application hosting products (XenDesktop and XenApp, respectively). I doubt you'll catch a Citrix sales rep stating that VMware's Horizon is superior to XenDesktop.
Citrix metraframe/presentation server/xenapp or whatever it is called these days was a quite good application, plenty of companies I know would benefit from it if it was priced sensibly.
For some reason Citrix even tried to stop selling it.
XenServer is good as a poor's man vmware, decent management tools and documentation.
It will be sad to see them go.
So, whilst I agree with the thrust of the article, I think you're semi-informed on some of the developments at Virtzilla in recent months and that may have skewed some of your views.
VMware acquired Immidio to solve the problem that their Profile Management solution (formerly RTO) was a heap of shit- and was gifting money to trickle-down players like AppSense and frustrating their VDI deals. Immidio had just closed a deal with a very large financial services firm for a very large deployment- and have proven scalability and ease of management chops.
LWL on the other hand have third rate tech they acquired from someone else, and have put a web interface on it- the entire thing is written in KixxScript. So it 1) does not scale, 2) is difficult to manage and 3) It is flaky (I can give you some former customers if you want to talk to them about it). It is why LWL, despite a cash injection of $11 million last year, approached their largest competitor to see if they wanted to license any tech- they were low on money, and had bet the farm on being acquired by VMW- totally deluded rubbish, hoping to pull another RTO on VMW.
Having said that, LWL do have an ace in the hole, and it's not their woeful FlexApp technology- so useful they've had to give it away with ProfileUnity. Flex-IO is a very good solution for it's price point- and quite a threat to more expensive players in the same space but LWL lack the capital, marketing and sales expertise to execute on it.
If Citrix were to acquire LWL, I doubt they'd internally have the capability to make it worthwhile. Citrix don't have a great track record in recent years around integrating acquisitions and knowing the technology on offer as well as the senior team at Citrix in both the technology and management arms- I think it would die on the vine. The same is true at VMW if they were to acquire them for Flex-IO.
Citrix are not going to acquire themselves out of this funk- they need to hire themselves out of this funk by getting rid of the morons in the ivory towers who have a message that does not resonant at a strategic level with Enterprises. The comment I heard from a CTO at a FinServe customer on why VMW over Citrix was also surprising- they felt Citrix were not responsive to Enterprise requires on their roadmap and instead too focused on Service Providers. I think there is a huge amount of truth to that.
VMW did make the best acquisition- Immidio was the right price, the right functionality level at the right time with a proven portfolio. Given the only other proven solution is AppSense*, and the price point for AS would never lead to VMW recouping it's purchase price.
* RES has never delivered scale any more than LWL- to the point that I have heard that AppSense Performance Manager was used at a certain customer to stop RES from tanking their servers. Still- nicer interface than AS with a better strategic message.
We're really going to have to agree to disagree here, mate. Having used both products, I'm confident LWL is superior to Immidio. It's a little rough around the edges, but the latest releases absolutely have been increasing in quality, and they provide a broader array of capabilities than Immidio.
Now, nothing is absolute. There are things to like about Immidio that LWL could learn from. overall though, I stick by what I wrote: LWL was the better choice, and VMware flubbed it.
You are, of course, welcome to your own view. The ability to mix and match solutions to meet one's needs is what makes IT so powerful.
Dear Anonymous Coward.
First and Foremost - you are of course entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
1. LWL is used, at the largest of largest scale (40,000 ++seats physical, vdi, rdsh, XenApp), daily, across the portfolio - often two or more of our products.
2. LWL did NOT raise $11mil last year, and never has- we are an organically funded company that relies on delivering highly useful software to companies large and small. These companies pay us for that. That is how we run the business.
3. Yes (shocker to some) - we did align tightly with VMW in the past based on product gaps
4. Yes (shocker to more) - we have had conversations with competitors over the years (and only someone breaking an NDA would share more)
5. FlexApp is the single biggest threat to VMW EUC at present (better faster cheaper than AppVolumes - but dont take my word for it - bake them off vs. each other and let us all know the results) and seeing RES and AppSense have no application layering - we are not in the same category.
6. LWL has, by any conceivable metric - the best "WEM" stack as VMW call it - for any windows delivery style (physical, vdi, ts, rdsh, daas, xenapp, etc)
Visibility: StratusphereUX
AppLayers: FlexApp
UEM: ProfileUnity
All of the above, are used by the largest companies in the world, at scale - and while that clearly scares a bunch of our competitors....it should...go back and innovate versus barking factless, derogatory rants.
"If a Citrix rep goes in to pitch an account they need to pitch the whole stack, including LWL, Nutanix and what-have-you."
"The ability to mix and match solutions to meet one's needs is what makes IT so powerful."
Don't know which of those two positions you follow Trevor, but personally I've been on the end of too many "we can do the whole thing, you don't need anyone else ever" pitches to be interested in listening to citrix joining that crowd .....
The ability to have an answer for every need doesn't mean it all has to be sold as one go. It means that they have to have an answer for everything and the ability to sell it all at once, if that's what the customer wants.
Customers shouldn't have to bring in 3 or more vendors to solve all the various pieces of the puzzle for a given solution. Especially a solution like VDI which is almost always deployed in isolation as its own product.
If you only want to buy one part of the solution, you should have that ability. But the sales guy should be able to sell you everything you might possibly need to make any aspect of that solution go, and the sales engineer should be an experienced expert able to answer in detail why you might need or want any given component. Ideally they should also be good enough to architect you a solution based on your expressed needs.
If you are such an expert that you can personally mix and match without needing pre-sales support, congratulations! You're among a select few! But the vast majority of sysadmins don't even know what application virtualization is, let alone user experience management. To say noting of being able to actually discuss the issues related to the implementation of either!
Tech is so big. So mind boggling, overwhelming big. No one person can be an expert in anything but a small fraction of it. So yeah: vendors that can sell as pieces or as stacks are required. To fill the gaps in our knowledge with their solutions.
That's what we ****ing pay them for, after all.
A bit like saying Cars and Trucks are pretty much the only revenue stream Ford has.
Except its just not true, is it?
Citrix Revenues: Three Months Ended March 31, 2015
Product and licenses $183,281
Software as a service $169,364
License updates and maintenance $371,297
Professional services $36,860
Or if you'd prefer, from the same quarter's earnings call
"... in delivery networking, total revenue decreased 3% in the quarter to $161 million.
... revenue from our Mobility Apps business grew 8% to $169 million." - David Henshall CFO
I think this whole scaremongering about Elliot is really mis-founded.
Citrix will be fine. It did need a change at the top. Tt had taken far too long for it to release its cloud solution. Lets see what the new CEO and CItrix as a whole brings in the new year. It really should be a much more lucrative and profitable year than previous years, especially with Windows 10, and the release of its new Cloud solution...
VMware solution for the VDI is crap. Everyone knows it.. lack of session reliability, mapping local drives, support for WAN optimisation, list goes on. If Citrix can be the premium solution in the VDI space and also match its costs, then it is on a winner.
Profile management is key for any VDI project and there are plenty of solutions out there, I don’t think VMWare needed to do anything in this space.
Some of the rationale for Citrix over VMWare have diminished over the last few year but it has been around the Remote Desktop protocols not Profile Management.
VMWare used to be only RDP only but they have now licensed Teradici PCOIP that now works with RDSH Sessions (Basically the same as XenApp) but VMWare don’t own it. So they are depended on a third party to compete and at any time the relationship between them could break down which is a risk.
When you compare protocols head to head HDX vs PCOIP, HDX is better over the WAN, given the prices are a fag paper apart and Citrix have been doing this for 25 years + and add in that Citrix have the Netscaler it is a better all-round solution.
I will worry for Citrix if VMWare were to acquire F5 and Teridici then that’s it, they are the same as Citrix.
Brett Loveday
I remember when they were rebranding themselves as an infrastructure company, as one example.
Then there was the way they 'dropped' XenApp with the launch of XenDeskop 7.0 - only they didn't drop it, they just kind of hid it from sight.
And then they make some strange decisions - they spent all of that money for rights to XenServer and then did pretty much nothing with it. They removed or deprecated things like advanced storage features without any real warning. And yet they have some decent features when you consider the costs. Especially some of the tight integration with XD and XA.
Look at XenClient - this could have been a great product. I know some people fail to see a real use case, but I can see quite a few. Whatever your point of view, having a desktop/laptop bare metal hypervisor meant lots of separation. It could even be shoehorned onto a MacBook and that would've been a killer (if they could sort through licensing with Apple of course) for BYoD.
I've seen too many XenDesktop based VDI implementations that were done poorly to count.
I've seen too many XenApp implementations that weren't done particularly badly but went into environments that weren't designed for them and the contentions for resources killed Citrix. And as it was the thing users saw, then it was Citrix that got the blame.
I am a huge fan of using AppSense tools for things like managing profiles and enhancing security.
Personally I think that Citrix have an image problem that has been happening over a decade or more. Where do they position themselves in the enterprise any more? It's been a hard-sell for a while and with Microsoft and VMware snapping at their heels, it's only going to get harder.
Have been working for years with vmware ESX, workstation, virtual box, terminal server. But I had to call in experts to install Citrix XenApp server. They have really messed this one up. I counted 14 citrix services running on my server in order to get it all up and running.
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