Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B • Hacker News Board

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#101

Post by jiggawatts » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:10 AM UTC

alexjplant wrote: post #77

guidedlight wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citrix originally licensed the technology for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to Microsoft. RDP was a pared back version of Citrix, and the license terms left Citrix free to sell a with a more fully-featured virtualised desktop product running on top of Windows Server.

Wikipedia says "Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft" and that "[the] Terminal Services Edition of NT 4.0 relied on Citrix's MultiWin technology, previously provided as a part of Citrix WinFrame atop Windows NT 3.51, in order to support multiple users and login sessions simultaneously". Based on this it sounds to me like the protocol itself was the work of Microsoft and that…

My understanding is that back in the early 2000s the Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP protocols were nearly identical. Common code and all that.

One of the reasons companies licensed Citrix is because Citrix kept investing in ICA and it was about 2-3 times as bandwidth efficient. In the era of 64 Kbps ISDN WAN links this was critical.

Microsoft did something around 2008 and now RDP seems better overall. It can handle 4K at 30 fps without difficulty.

Meanwhile Citrix did weird random things to ICA that made it markedly worse.

It says a lot that all of the Citrix engineers I’ve worked with (including myself) prefer to RDP into a Citrix server instead of using its native ICA protocol!

Other deliberate breakage was Citrix deprecating SSL support directly on the session hosts. They did this to force customers to buy their overpriced Netscaler / ADC appliances. These slow down connections and can’t handle many 4K streams.

Generally they seem to have become an acquisition-driven company instead of an engineering-led one.

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#102

Post by lmm » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:17 AM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #92

glandium wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating when I see "[Company I haven't heard of for so long that it might as well have died] acquired for [surprisingly large amount of money]"

Zombie companie somehow eats brains of another near zombie company.

"Dinosaurs mating" was the old phrase.

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#103

Post by arthurcolle » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:24 AM UTC

devoutsalsa wrote: post #82

disordinary wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citrix are pretty ubiquitous in the corporate space. Not as big a deal as they were ten or 15 years ago, but still a huge company that powers a lot of businesses.

At work, I need to use Citrix to check my email on Lotus Notes!

you still use Lotus Notes? wtf ?

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#104

Post by xtracto » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:40 AM UTC

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #19

I just find it fascinating that I can go through my life and see things like this: "[Company I've never heard of] and [Another company I've never heard of], something something, billions and billions of dollars". And these companies and the people who run them probably have a non-trivial impact on my life, if not directly than indirectly. It's just fascinating.

Back in the 90s or early 2000s Citrix had amazing technology.

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#105

Post by robocat » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:44 AM UTC

Tibco General Interface - Enterprise Edition!

An early Ajax framework that sunk without a trace? Version 3.8 introduced Chrome 2.0 support, with a headline feature being support for Dojo framework components. The last version 3.9.2 added support for IE11. Memory lane for anyone evaluating primitive Ajax frameworks. https://docs.tibco.com/pub/general_interface_enterprise_edit...

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#106

Post by slt2021 » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:48 AM UTC

arthurcolle wrote: post #103

devoutsalsa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work, I need to use Citrix to check my email on Lotus Notes!

you still use Lotus Notes? wtf ?

IBM employee probably...

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#107

Post by oconnor663 » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:49 AM UTC

joschmo wrote: post #60

Background on the deal. TIBCO was acquired by Vista Equity Partners 8 years ago and has been a disaster investment. Growth never picked up despite their investments in product, technology, sales and marketing. As a result, TIBCO was stuck selling better software from acquisitions to their existing customer base. Large cap private equity investors like Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake and Blackstone noticed TIBCO's failures m…

> until it gets foisted on a company like Broadcom or IBM that would be happy to churn out billions in cash from it

How does this part work?

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#108

Post by joschmo » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 2:54 AM UTC

snake_doc wrote: post #94

joschmo wrote: post #60

Background on the deal. TIBCO was acquired by Vista Equity Partners 8 years ago and has been a disaster investment. Growth never picked up despite their investments in product, technology, sales and marketing. As a result, TIBCO was stuck selling better software from acquisitions to their existing customer base. Large cap private equity investors like Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake and Blackstone noticed TIBCO's failures m…

Your background missed Elliot’s 5yr+ activist history towards Citrix since 2015, with a brief break around 2020. At the time of this deal, they owned ~12% of Citrix. After 2020 board changes, Elliot bought back into Citrix around Q3 21, so at best around $95-100/sh. This deal pays out $104/sh. So it’s almost a rollover from their equity to PE fund. Elliot is obsessed with Citrix, and this is furthering their convicti…

You're right that it's not paying out Vista much if anything at all when you account for fees, but it's still a nine-figure sum of new money in, which is lifeblood for these zombie B2B software companies to get a few more shots on goal to fix their situation.

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#109

Post by ironSkillet » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:01 AM UTC

oconnor663 wrote: post #107

joschmo wrote: post #60

Background on the deal. TIBCO was acquired by Vista Equity Partners 8 years ago and has been a disaster investment. Growth never picked up despite their investments in product, technology, sales and marketing. As a result, TIBCO was stuck selling better software from acquisitions to their existing customer base. Large cap private equity investors like Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake and Blackstone noticed TIBCO's failures m…

> until it gets foisted on a company like Broadcom or IBM that would be happy to churn out billions in cash from it How does this part work?

My guess is ruthlessly cut costs and gradually degrade remaining customer good will until it's a dessicated corpse.

Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

#110

Post by joschmo » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 3:02 AM UTC

kolbe wrote: post #78

joschmo wrote: post #60

Background on the deal. TIBCO was acquired by Vista Equity Partners 8 years ago and has been a disaster investment. Growth never picked up despite their investments in product, technology, sales and marketing. As a result, TIBCO was stuck selling better software from acquisitions to their existing customer base. Large cap private equity investors like Thoma Bravo, Silver Lake and Blackstone noticed TIBCO's failures m…

I disagree this is necessarily good for PE. PE/late stage VC used to have a game plan for how to dress these companies up to get huge growth multipliers, and then stick them in the S&P 500, but that game looks dead. Tiger Global was the poster child for this, and their -50% returns this year should be sending everyone back to the drawing board. Unless Vista really thinks they can manipulate the old tech companies the…

This is a completely different universe from VC, Tiger, Figma or even the public markets. Software companies like this (low growth, high cash flow) got absolutely eviscerated in the public markets over the last decade so they would never consider that. And TIBCO is about 20 years out from the growth they needed to attract VC money or money from Tiger. Won't bother with the Figma exit comparison. The universe of buyers after this company will either be a mega-club deal with a mix of PE firms, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc. or one of the hulking B2B software giants I had mentioned.

No matter how you want to couch it, PE firms got away with this one. They're content to grow the topline 4-8% per year and cash flows 10-15% (the real metric that matters because the company isn't growing enough to ever be valued on a revenue multiple but will be valued on an EBITDA or FCF multiple). At roughly 15,000 combined headcount today, I'd expect that number to be under 10,000 in 24 months.