New CEO not likely to change Tibco once merged with Citrix
The revelation that Tibco will have a new CEO once its merger with Citrix is complete came as a surprise to some, but the change in leadership will likely not have a significant impact on the analytics vendor’s platform development or its customers.
Tibco, founded in 1997 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a subsidiary of Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp.
In January 2022, Vista and Evergreen reached an agreement to acquire Citrix, a digital workspace technology vendor founded in 1989 and based in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., with the acquisition expected to close some time during the third quarter of this year.
Once completed, Vista and Evergreen plan to merge Citrix and Tibco to create a single company that will join Citrix’s digital workspace and application delivery platform with Tibco’s analytics and data management capabilities.
On Monday, Vista revealed that rather than appoint Tibco CEO Dan Streetman or Citrix chairman and interim president and CEO Bob Calderoni to lead the combined entity, it will instead bring in Tom Krause as the new CEO.
Krause was promoted to president of semiconductor giant Broadcom in 2020 and helped oversee Broadcom’s recent $61 billion acquisition of VMWare. Before that, he was Broadcom’s chief financial officer for four years. Streetman and Calderoni will remain in their roles until Tibco and Citrix are combined.
The move to bring in Krause was somewhat surprising but makes sense given the current economic climate, according to Doug Henschen, an analyst at Constellation Research. He noted that Krause has a financial background, while Streetman was a sales leader before ascending to CEO and Citrix currently has an interim leader. And with the sharp declines in the stock market in 2022 and fears of a recession, the appointment of Krause indicates that Vista is placing an emphasis on the monetary health of Tibco and Citrix. “We’ve just had a major shakeout in the financial markets and Vista appears to be more concerned about financial management at this time,” Henschen said. While Streetman won’t be Tibco’s CEO once the merger with Citrix is complete, the analytics vendor will still have its product and development leaders in place, which suggests stability for current Tibco customers, he added. Tibco offers three separate analytics platform with Spotfire enabling deep data exploration, streaming analytics and data science; WebFocus specializing in scalable reporting that allows thousands of users to view and work with the same data; and JasperSoft designed for developers to enable them to embed BI within applications. The analytics tools help make up Tibco’s “predict” portfolio. In addition, the vendor has a connect portfolio that includes its cloud capabilities and a unify portfolio that addresses data management. Meanwhile, despite the pending change at the top, Nelson Petracek remains Tibco’s chief technology officer and Matt Quinn is still its chief operating officer. And at the product level, Mark Palmer is its senior vice president of analytics, data science and data products. “Reports to the CEO at each brand unit can steer software direction,” Henschen said. In fact, the day after it was revealed that Streetman will eventually depart Tibco and Krause will become its new CEO, the vendor released ModelOps, an anticipated tool first unveiled in preview more than a year ago that will enable organizations to quickly deploy data science models at scale.
