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Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B

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

#151

Post by joschmo »

pramodbiligiri wrote: post #148
joschmo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's macro-good and micro-bad. On the good side, I was allowed to view this from the perspective of spreadsheets and board meetings and see the net gains. And also do follow-up analysis that showed the least product people retiring or moving to lower quality work while the most productive went on to do 10x better things. The dark side isn't pretty. We still had to lay off tens of thousands, affecting hundreds of thou…

In what terms are deals like these discussed internally? Your analysis was very matter-of-fact. Do internal documents speak the same way or do they have to dress it up in elaborate positive sounding lingo? (synergy, growth opportunity and the like).

Depends on the audience. Am I having a ground-truth level conversation with my deal team? Then everything is neutral. No positive or negative tones. Just assessment of what is good and bad, what could go right or wrong, and the process to build the probabilistic fan of outcomes that drives our target returns.

To my investment committee? We're in sell mode and using the positive coded language you outline. "We see $350M in day 1 synergies (this means fire thousands of people immediately). $600M by the end of our 180-day plan. And $1b by completion of our value creation plan 365 days post-close. This builds in a 1.8x floor for cash flow growth even if we're delayed in synergy realization and frees up cash for our go-to-market investments. Given the current GTM org returns $1 of ARR for every $1 spent, and our current market analysis of total whitespace, we plan on investing 30% of every dollar saved into our sales and marketing initiatives and additional 5% in a product refresh focused around key sales rep pain points like UI/UX and ease of use."

Even when we're selling to our IC, it's still very factual because these people are professional BS-detectors.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #150
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 was mind-blown when I found that you could do this...effectively buying a company with that company's own money. Michael Dell acquired EMC that way, and with some financial engineering, came out ahead with a few ten billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-...

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by tinco »

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.

I heard of TIBCO in two ways, the first time was from my housemates friend who was visiting. We were still poor college students and this friend was making fat stacks as a consultant for TIBCO. Apparently their business model is selling their system for cheap, throwing in as much support and help as they can integrating it deep in their clients business processes. And once that's succesful they raise the prices each year to exorbitant amounts.

The other way I learned at a meetup that was hosted by the ING (a large international bank). An architect was trying to recruit me to come work at ING and explained their fancy architecture to me. Right at the heart of it was a TIBCO message passing layer. It made me cringe.

I don't know why they couldn't have just picked rabbitmq or something, probably similar reasons to why some companies pick oracle over postgres. I don't think it's worth it, but I'm not an enterprise architect.

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

#154

Post by djbebs »

lemax wrote: post #121

Can 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?

Tibco sells integration software. Say you want to get your SAP systems to communicate with your databases, while having some logic to modify the data being passed through, then you can use TIBCO business works to connect to both and implement the logic

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

#155

Post by paganel »

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 ?

There's very good money to be made in consulting if you "know" Lotus Notes. Even a lot more if you know how to migrate the thing (presumably to MS Exchange).

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

#156

Post by bruce511 »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #150
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 was mind-blown when I found that you could do this...effectively buying a company with that company's own money. Michael Dell acquired EMC that way, and with some financial engineering, came out ahead with a few ten billions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-...

It doesn't matter. At the end of the day it's all your money anyway, just in a different place. The following is a simplification, but the concept should (I hope) be clear.

Let's say you want to buy an asset that can generate revenue. Let's also assume you need to borrow the amount, that you don't have it lying around.

You could take out a loan, and back it with some other asset, like your car.

Or you can get the company to take out a loan.

If the Company makes money, that money goes to servicing the debt. Either way its "your money" servicing the debt.

There are reasons to select one approach over the other, but putting the loan in the company name is often better for tax, and personal asset protection, reasons.

So yes, you buy the company with its future profits, but ultimately that's why you buy it in the first place.

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

#157

Post by parasubvert »

chrisseaton wrote: post #76
timc3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is a very well known software company. I have never used Citrix, but to me its as a name the same way as VMWare, SAP, EMC, Salesforce and Intuit is.

Again, all those are old-style enterprise software. If you didn't work in a legacy corporate environment, you'd never encounter them.

Umm. If you file taxes with a computer, you’re using Intuit.

If you have a datacenter, it has a good shot of running some VMware.

If you run logistics at almost any medium sized or bigger company, you’re using SAP or Oracle.

If you have a group of employees that sell things, Salesforce is common.

This is the software that literally runs the world. If you’re not familiar with it, then you’re ignorant about how the world works. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I don’t understand the pride in it. Especially on HN, where Hackers tend to be curious.

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

#158

Post by DrBazza »

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.

> "[Company I've never heard of] and [Another company I've never heard of],

I'm going to guess you're under 30?

Amongst the many things Tibco sold was Rendezvous, which was extremely popular in the banks for running trading systems back in... the 90s and early 00s. Then of course, multi-core chips came along and sending messages to other processes on single cores over the network, versus, other processes in the same bit of silicon via memory instead.

And Citrix - another extremely popular bit of software for connecting remotely to Windows boxes (amongst other things). Again in the 90s and early 00s.

There seems to be so many of these zombie companies now. Embarcadero is another one that always springs to mind. Produces nothing new, just shambles around on existing revenue streams.

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

#159

Post by pramodbiligiri »

joschmo wrote: post #151
pramodbiligiri wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what terms are deals like these discussed internally? Your analysis was very matter-of-fact. Do internal documents speak the same way or do they have to dress it up in elaborate positive sounding lingo? (synergy, growth opportunity and the like).

Depends on the audience. Am I having a ground-truth level conversation with my deal team? Then everything is neutral. No positive or negative tones. Just assessment of what is good and bad, what could go right or wrong, and the process to build the probabilistic fan of outcomes that drives our target returns. To my investment committee? We're in sell mode and using the positive coded language you outline. "We see $35…

Haha. That’s some great dressing up. Thanks for the detailed reply.

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

#160

Post by pjmlp »

bboygravity wrote: post #147
raffraffraff wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the corporate Windows desktop space of the early 2000s, the Citrix product was almost like magic. The problem it aimed to solve was reduction in cost and effort to deliver applications to users. Instead of managing a fleet of 'expensive' desktop computers, you install the desktop applications on a Citrix server and 'publish' them over a remote desktop protocol. The potential was huge! It was a real challenge…

And then to reality (when I was forced to use it at a client): Insanely unbaringly slow with tons of constant lag and IT issues. I know, anecdote...

My anecdote is that it works much better than any X Windows setup that I have used, and since around 2011 it is either Citrix or RDP on most of our projects.

If we get projects with customers that will rather hand us low quality Dells with 4 / 8 GB with HDD, to access their infrastructure, I will always advocate for a Citrix or RDP based setup instead, due to how bad those laptops tend to be.

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