Heard massive reshuffle recently.
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It has been evident for some time that Citrix’s previous ‘leadership’ and the current bunch from the Microsoft scrapheap are incapable of improving the core products, launching new products, and growing the company. Instead, the focus is now on optimising and cost cutting to make the margins look good. Unfortunately, this is only a temporary bandage and the changes to Citrix are simply placing lipstick on a pig.
The management extolled the Q4 numbers, which only represented 1% growth from year on year. The overall growth for 2016 was only 4%. Some of the Q4 sales came from stealing business from Q1 and Q2 by offering steep discounts to forward purchases. The focus on the cloud is simply a diversion for the lack of innovation and efficiency.
I think this company was great when I started, but it is definitely deteriorating. We see plenty of dead weight that has survived in Fort Lauderdale, whilst the intriguers push quality people out. It certainly makes sense to start knocking on other doors before the Citrix ship finally sinks.
Three senior vp's left the company recently: klaus osterman, bill burley, and jesse lipson. Hard to say how much was "push" vs. "jump." Klaus was probably equal parts push and jump, burley more push than jump, and jesse more jump than push. They ran the netscaler, xen, and sharefile businesses, respectively. klaus and jesse are still at citrix for a bit longer, but they were removed from the citrix.com executive page back in january. The hurry to remove them from the website feels like the big boss saying 'good riddance' to these guys. Big boss didn't hire any of these 3 guys (he inherited them when he joined citrix a year aago) and he has installed new people into the exec team.
this is a 180 degree difference between the current big boss and mark t. In the Mark t days, jesse and klaus probably would have been given ceremonial titles (as with peter levine and wes Doe) like "sr. vp of strategy" and left on the executive page of citrix.com for 6-12 months while not actually doing any real work.