This may just be my ignorance, but didn't we rebrand NetScaler to ADC? Also, why does this product get it's own business unit? Is it just too different from our other products?
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Some people think there's going to be one big company with a fancy new name, and everyone's going to live happily ever after. This is more like Gordon Gekko wanting to chop up Blue Star Airlines "because it's breakable." The names Citrix and TIBCO won't exist down the road. Their products/customers will be absorbed by whoever wants to buy them. Even if you survive the layoffs and are still standing in January, that's only temporary. The writing is on the wall.
16B to 20B?! Unfortunately you are talking about apples and oranges.... 16B was Citrix market value. When they say Citrix will become a 20B company, they mean annual revenue, as compared to 5B of Citrix + Tibco today. The only way to get from 5B to 20B in annual revenue is to acquire new companies. Why? Because most products these two companies are mature and are in saturated markets, so they cant increase revenue 4X organically.
That's why the move to BUs - clean scalable way to add (or remove) businesses fast.
The purpose of the PE transaction is to make money for the investors. The only modern part of the Citrix portfolio was Wrike. The rest are businesses that missed market transitions. And they don't make any more sense when they are together-never really did.
So, PE brought a financial leader who will chop up the pieces and sell them for more than they bought them for. Will these business units need to keep growing? of course. To take it from $16B to $20B while a challenge, is not impossible. And Krause will be measured on return on invested capital. Given the amount of debt issued for the transaction, actual capital from Elliott and Vista seems comparably low. If at the end they keep $4B as part of their equity and net out another $4B after all debt financing, that would be a 2X return. If they can do that in 3-4 years by splitting the company, the MOIC will be 2X and ROI will be fantastic.
So yes, Krauss is the right person for the chop and shop. He is not the strategic growth person. If anyone is delusional to think otherwise, time to wake up.
Is the whole purpose of this merger to sell off the units and have no company left? Krause claims the goal is to be a $20 billion company! I don't see it.
I am guessing the NetScaler business was on the block at least once every 2 years since 2015. The numbers were never fun, including possibly the tax burden of an appreciated asset. Its value in the market has steadily deteriorated since. F5 made the switch to security, new apps on cloud are using what is built-in, while the NS team keeps dreaming of a subscription service- read the tea leaves folks.
And now with junior management, it is really going to go to places. Oh such a waste of what was a market kicking product.
Trying to promote the whole Citrix 'application delivery and networking' product line has been similar to putting lipstick on a pig. It doesn't matter what it's named, it's not attractive to any investor, we've already tried. If Krause manages to sell it off, then expect pennies on the dollar.
When the business units are named NetScaler, Citrix and TIBCO, with inexperienced product people put on them as GMs, it’s loudly signaling that they will be sold and absorbed, not nurtured.
We haven't been told the name of the new Company, so maybe this is step 1 of the rebranding to Tibco NetScaler.
ITM was end of sale back in 2019. It lives on as part of the Cloud NetScaler/ADC, but hasn't been sold as a standalone product for about 3 years.
SD-WAN was basically junked with the layoffs last November. Maybe the virtual version (rarely sold) is sticking around for a bit, but I believe that all sales motions have ended for the product.
What happened to ITM, SD-WAN under networking umbrella
Renaming it back to NetScaler is probably to start severing the name from Citrix for an eventual separation into a new company or to be sold. The question is who is going to lead a business who’s business leaders have all been pushed out and it’s engineering leaders are just but a shadow of Rajiv Sinha, a great fellow who just past away.
The whole story about hardware or software is long gone. The Adc has been selling as pure software option for a long time
Because everyone else is being really rude - Netscaler is the only product that’s physical hardware within Citrix. It’s been around for a very long time. The rest of the products are aimed at moving from on-prem to cloud whereas ADC is onprem only. Which makes it significantly different than the rest of Citrix’ business units. Ignore the rude people. They’re just bitter because they’re probably on the chopping block themselves.
You clearly don't work at Citrix or else you would understand what prompted this question...
Our? If you don't know the difference between what a NetScaler does - it was renamed horribly almost 4 years ago to Citrix ADC - and what CVAD and the rest of the Citrix product line does, then no one can probably explain it to you at this point.