Any old school Amazon-ers here cringing when they hear the name "Tibco"?
Tibco rvd and UDP multicast crushing switch buffers and falling back to UDP unicast to crush them even harder during the ramp up to Christmas.
^ this guy Rendezvouses
Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
131–140 of 191 posts
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#132Can someone explain what either of these two companies are actually selling, beyond the cryptic marketing messaging on their respective websites? Someone in this thread indicated that Citrix was the original developer of Microsoft Remote Desktop, and later licensed it to Microsoft. All Citrix's website seems to offer is "One digital workspace platform to empower secure hybrid work". And what's the deal with Tibco?
Citrix is like VNC or Remote Desktop or NoMachine.
Tibco is like Apache ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ or IBM WebSphere MQ.
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#133I 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.
If you're only in startups, that would make sense but citrix is big in the corporate world. I worked for a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway for a few years out of college and our who setup depended on citrix. Keeping it vague, we allowed people to bid for allocations of space on transportation infrastructure. When a huge company wanted to spend millions to buy some space, they'd download our client which was actually just a citrix portal that tunneled to desktop software running on our servers. My company was a billion dollar company so you may have never heard of them, but citrix was absolutely crucial to our cash flow.
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is a really big place. For example, when Okta bought Auth0 last year, that was titanic for my employer (we're in their space). But it barely made a ripple to anyone outside of the auth space. People still confuse Auth0 with OAuth when I give talks! I think about it in other ways too. Look around you. Wherever you are, unless you are in the wilderness, there are 1000s of companies that worked to bring the bu…
I find the Auth0 acquisition to be more impressive. Many people (even non-tech) know about Citrix because of Windows. Almost no one outside of tech (and many people inside tech too) knows anything about auth0. Yet, we have a company that was acquired for 6.5 billions of dollars.
The combined market cap of the S&P 500 is 30.5 trillion. The companies everyone knows about probably account for about ~10T. The remaining 20T represents a long tail of unknown companies worth a few 10s of billions.
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#135Feels like the beginning of the end for Citrix. I've deployed their various products since 1999, back in the NT4 Terminal Server edition. I have fond memories of running MS Word on UNIX terminals at university by connecting to Citrix running on NT4 on my home PC. Other students would walk past rows of screens in the computer lab all showing drab black and white fixed-width text editors except for one in the middle wi…
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Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#136Background 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?
The acquiring company basically cranks up their fees to the acquired customer base to weed out anyone that a. doesn't have deep pockets and b. has an alternative. The customers they are left with are then stuck with you and you can continue to ratchet up prices while cutting costs for years. of course this requires that the software in use is hard to replace, or in the parlance, has a big moat. if you get it right you can make billions with this strategy. after all, an unhappy customer makes more money than a happy prospect.
conversely, any start-up that can bridge the moat is guaranteed a thrilling ride.
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#137Background 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…
> [...] this black hole of a company [...]
> [...] massive waves of layoffs [...]
Given that you seem to like neither the ingredients nor the result of the merger, shouldn't you be happy, if they release workers so that they can join more societally productive ventures?
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 buyer…
Honestly, this seems all rather reasonable?
These companies are basically dying. So might as well manage the decline and return money to investors.
It's good for the economy as a whole if employees move to other companies; instead of engaging in make-work.
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#139I've used Tibco jaspersoft I Ireport for dynamical pdf generation
Re: Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
#140Background 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…
> [...] this black hole of a company [...] > [...] massive waves of layoffs [...] Given that you seem to like neither the ingredients nor the result of the merger, shouldn't you be happy, if they release workers so that they can join more societally productive ventures?
I'm trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It's a black hole because these machines will acquire anything and feed it through the cash flow machine. Massive waves of layoffs because there will be multiple 1K+ layoffs coming over the next year or two as they execute the integration plan.
Massive waves of layoffs are bad for most people and usually great for the company but I won't put a value judgment on it. Some think it "leaves them free to pursue more productive things" and others think "that person is going to struggle for a while due to corporate greed for cash flow." Candidly, I've done several of these deals before where we merge two companies of similar complexity and lay off 50-70% of the combined headcount. The company almost always turns out better for it. Things are that inefficient past a certain FTE size.
For those laid off, it's a different story. An internal analysis done by consultants my team hired 3 years after a multi-stage layoff of 10K people found that >50% of those affected were materially worse off and only 10% were better off. Statistical analysis on the strongest prediction of negative outcomes was age. Nothing else was even close to as relevant.