The Citrix deal and what it means for Tibco
At the end of January, Citrix was acquired by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital. The $16.6bn deal will mean Citrix’s line of workplace and virtual desktop integration tools will become part of the Tibco product portfolio.
The deal appears to have been driven by Citrix’s new CEO, Bob Calderoni, who only took over in October 2021.
In his first earnings call briefing after becoming CEO, in November 2021, Calderoni was asked specifically about divestiture. At the time, no one anticipated that Citrix would go all out and be sold to a private equity firm.
According to a transcript of the earnings call, posted on the Seeking Alpha financial blogging site, Calderoni said he felt “good” about the three main businesses Citrix operated – VDI desktop as a service (DaaS), its cloud-based content collaboration platform, and the application delivery controller (ADC) products it acquired when it acquired NetScaler for $300m in 2005.
At the time, Calderoni said: “We are investing in ADC as a service and we’ll continue to do that. I see ADC as an important part of our VDI and DaaS solutions. So we’re largely going to stay in those three businesses. But like every company, there are always investments that are being made around the edges of all of that stuff and sometimes those investments are synergistic to what we’re doing.”
But less than three months after he made those remarks, and just four months in as the new CEO, Calderoni has spearheaded a transition that sees Citrix become a private entity within the same group that owns Tibco.
Announcing the company’s transition in January, Calderoni said: “Today’s announcement is the culmination of a strategic review process conducted over five months, including extensive outreach to both potential financial and strategic buyers.”
According to Calderoni, becoming a private company will enable Citrix to transition into new areas as it strives to provide products and services to meet the appetite for digital transformation required by IT buyers.
“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. “As a private company, we will have increased financial and strategic flexibility to invest in high-growth opportunities, such as DaaS, and accelerate its ongoing cloud transition.”
The deal pulls in Vista Equity Partners, which owns Tibco, and Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management. Elliott was behind EMC’s plans to spin out VMware, which later led to Dell’s $67bn purchase of EMC in 2015.
In a blog discussingthe Citrix acquisition, Forrester senior analyst Andrew Hewitt said the deal would expand the size of Citrix’s customer base to over 400,000.
