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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

#171

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

#172

Post by nikau »

elguyosupremo wrote: post #125
jiggawatts wrote: post #24

Feels 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…

It's funny because I had an opposite kind of experience when I was in school in 2001, all the CS students needed to be in the labs to get the full unix experience but my friend and I figured out how to do xwindow forwarding to our windows PCs in the dorm and could work just like we were in the lab.

Citrix ICA was very bandwidth efficient, it would run acceptably over a dialup modem link. Xwindows, not so much.

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

#173

Post by transpute »

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…

Recap of Elliot saga (included ex-Microsoft CEO for 18 months, with $24M signing bonus and $32M severance), https://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/citrix-hensh...

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

#174

Post by [deleted] »

osigurdson wrote: post #134
csomar wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by raffraffraff »

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...

That's something else that had a tendency to kill a Citrix deal. But implementation details are important. In my experience, managers who worked from home loved it because they could get the complete office desktop experience at home. There'd be some visual lag for sure, but visual latency aside, file and print operations were snappy and reliable. Trying to open an Excel spreadsheet over a dial-up network drive took ages. Print jobs were worse. Most installations I saw were POCs that got used as a remote work solution for managers. Any time they decided to deploy an app to all office staff the thing would predictably fall over, because it wasn't sized for that.

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

#176

Post by acchow »

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…

Any chance you have a business blog?

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

#177

Post by that_guy_iain »

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 would love to know what happened in these companies that failed after someone bought it then ploughed tons of money into them.

Having just left one, the core reason for the failure was a tech plan forced upon two companies that was so unrealistic it was always going to fail. A bit of me thinks it's the problem was the investor for setting up a terrible plan. But realistically, I think it's more the management of the two companies inability to explain to a growth board that you can't rewrite a 7-year application in 3-months.

Original Plan: Migrate extra features and data over to new platform 3-months. If it's just a migration it's a bad timeline but overal not a bad plan. Problem was, it was a rewrite. The new platform didn't have the core features.

3-months pass: The growth board invests more money increases time and focuses everyone to this. While everyone keeps calling it a migration.

Another 3-months pass: The growth board invests even more money, increases the dev team, hires consultants who have help with such programs in the past.

Another 6-months pass: Still not delivered. Patence is getting thin. This was meant to be a 3-month project and it's been a year and we're not there. Extra time given with being features removed from scope. Delivery date announced to partners.

Another 3-months pass: Delivery date coming up, announcements made they will migrate on the deadline.

1-week before delivery: Team find out core functionality still doesn't exist. Announce another 3-4 month delay. Patience getting very thin.

Next deadline: They release a half finished product because management is going to get fired if they don't.

Result: Investor realises everything has gone wrong. After about €50-100 million investment Tries to sell company for €400 million. Drops price to €200 million. Sells for €75 million while clearing debt. Announces €50 million gain.

While the pressure from the owning company did cause issues, the original issue comes from the fact someone let them think it would originally be a 3-month project. This is not to mention that developers were telling the company management these deadlines couldn't be met, including 6-weeks before the first announced delivery date yet they continued to try and go forward until they realised at the last minute they couldn't meet the deadline. Every time it was at the last minute they would announce the deadline couldn't be met. Every 3-4 months the teams were working toward deliverying on a deadline.

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

#178

Post by pjmlp »

frou_dh wrote: post #169
pjmlp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can such a setup have a lossless presentation of the GUI? Personally I really dislike using a modern computer via a lossy video signal, just as a matter of principle. Same reason I'm not interested in cloud gaming even if the latency is great.

Yes HDMI quality isn't expected, but still much better then those lousy laptops anyway.

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

#179

Post by mring33621 »

DrBazza wrote: post #158
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…

My current, HUGE employer bases its whole remote/local workstation tech on Citrix products.

At a previous, also HUGE employer, we used Tibco Rendezvous for FX trade messaging and it was a great product, in that it was performant and never seemed to fail.

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

#180

Post by fny »

arawde wrote: post #5
fny wrote: post #3

The next decade is going to be heaven for M&A. Also, the yields on the bonds Citrix issued were eye-popping.

Afaik the bonds are issued by the PE firms executing the deal, and it's taken many months to close. The debt has sat on bank books for a significant portion of time, so the yields are reflective of the price needed to unload them in the current market vs a market that was more conducive to the offering when the deal was initially agreed upon

Buyouts don't need to be leveraged.
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