[HN Gopher] Citrix to be acquired for $16.5B, will be merged wit...
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Citrix to be acquired for $16.5B, will be merged with Tibco
Author : blopeur
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-01-31 14:32 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| lunatuna wrote:
| So little content in the article about why this was needed. The
| argument about improving analytics for Citrix products using
| Tibco products seems extremely weak. I don't see much if any
| opportunities here for any combined improvement at the tech stack
| level. Where there is any opportunity there is redundancy like
| gateway functionality.
|
| All the best to those working there and trying to figure out what
| next.
| apohn wrote:
| When I saw the headline I started laughing. I cannot for the
| life of me understand how these two companies make sense to
| glue together. Is Vista hoping it's like a bundled deal in the
| grocery store? Nobody wants to buy this particular brand of
| chocolate or this particular flavor of ice cream, but if I put
| it in a plastic bag and sell them together as a "weekly
| special" somebody will buy it???
| ct0 wrote:
| Let me disable updates without admin approval! Dont "remind me
| later" please!
| shrubble wrote:
| Citrix got started by using OS/2 , I remember seeing them in
| about 1993 at an OS/2 convention. Then they later switched to NT.
|
| The fully open source xcp-ng Xen based virtualization server is
| also based off their CitrixServer product.
| coinerone wrote:
| it wouldn't be surprising for me if Citrix now pushing its
| customers even more into their Hybrid cloud.
| xz18r wrote:
| This is what has been happening for years and is VERY likely to
| increase with this acquisition indeed... time to look for
| alternatives, people.
| jayski wrote:
| i worked at a place 15 years ago that offered me a nice raise if
| I became a citrix certified engineer...
|
| I studied for 2 months and passed, ive literally never used
| citrix in my life
| throwaway599281 wrote:
| I only used Citrix once and it was just horrible.
|
| I have no idea what hardware was supporting it, but I just
| couldn't work with it. Too slow and lots of graphical issues.
| unmole wrote:
| A long time ago, I almost accepted a job at Citrix. From the
| comments in this thread, it looks like I dodged a bullet.
| guyzero wrote:
| My mental picture reading this press release was a child's book
| of dinosaurs, immense, roaming the earth, unaware of their
| impending doom.
| floatinglotus wrote:
| What a fantastic collection of shitty tech companies!
| ineedasername wrote:
| Yeah, I remember when Spitfire came out & it was an interesting
| alternative to Tableau. Then Tibco acquired them & I haven't
| heard much if them since.
| thorin wrote:
| Same with Jaspersoft, I used to enjoy working with their
| technical guys and went to a few conferences, but then it
| disappeared into the larger Tibco bucket. Tibco did spend a
| bucketload of cash on a hotel for their conferences though,
| very flash but I didn't get much out of it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Spotfire, for the curious.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Ah, thanks. Damn you autocorrect.
| saxonww wrote:
| Apologies for this jumbled recollection and rant.
|
| I worked for a Vista-owned company for about 8 years. We were a
| division of a larger company spun out and sold to Vista. We
| eventually merged with a couple of other Vista purchases.
|
| The initial change I remember was that everyone had to take a
| combo personality/IQ test, the DPAT (dynamic personality
| assessment test?). It looks like they have replaced that with
| something called a CCAT now, but I'm sure it's essentially the
| same thing. The results of your test were not shared with you,
| and IIRC we were told that the results were available only to the
| CEO and their executive assistant. Candidates for hire had to
| take this test too, and if they didn't pass we couldn't hire
| them; it was challenging to hire people in our area. The general
| feeling was that no one applying to work with us was passing the
| DPAT, although I wasn't personally involved in any discussions
| where someone who would know that (CEO and EA only, remember...)
| told me so.
|
| Some time after this test - maybe a few months? - we had a large
| layoff. I don't know how many people it was, or how many people
| we had, actually. I believe the entire company had less than 2500
| people, and R&D was at most a few hundred. But they brought in
| security guards to patrol the office for a week or two during and
| after the layoff. Vista wanted us to hire "HPEL"s - high
| potential entry level. We seemed to have layoffs every 12-18
| months after that. We were always told that change was a
| constant, things were looking up, we don't anticipate more
| layoffs, did you know we are hiring!, etc.
|
| We were paid, and not tortured or anything. But pay was always
| below-market, and while my memory is fuzzy on the exact sequence
| of events, it seemed like we were changing 401k and health
| providers every couple of years. All hands meetings where people
| complained about compensation and such would get answers like "we
| continually evaluate industry conditions and remain competitive
| in the market etc. etc. etc." Leadership was not constant, and
| from my position it felt like we never remained committed to
| anything long enough to succeed. The meme where a baby runs down
| a hall, encounters something alarming at the corner, and then
| turns and starts to run back? It felt like that most of the time.
|
| The other thing that I thought was fishy but not surprising is
| that we developed business relationships with other Vista
| companies. We used Tibco, BigMachines, Marketo, Ping Identity,
| and maybe WebSense. We had training stuff from SumTotal. I don't
| remember there being an official policy around this - although
| Vista had their 'Vista Operating Procedures' playbook for
| acquisitions to execute - but it did seem like the invisible hand
| was pressing its invisible thumb on the scale somewhere.
|
| Morale was mostly terrible. I know it wasn't just me that felt
| that way, but I don't know how much of it was due to Vista vs.
| something else about our company. I do feel like PE acquiring you
| means you're not successful, that they think they're going to
| lean you out and flip you for a profit. So I would be worried if
| I were at Citrix, and if my own experience and observation is
| relevant I would suggest dusting off resumes and at least being
| prepared to move.
| apohn wrote:
| With exception of the security guards, your experience is spot
| on with one of my experiences working for (and through) a Vista
| acquisition.
|
| To me the morale killer was the constant change. HR constantly
| opening positions and then freezing hiring before we could hire
| somebody, resulting in so much wasted time interviewing people.
| We'd work on big project for a while, and then leadership would
| change directions and all that was a waste. By the time the 5th
| person on my team left, it was hard to not feel like everyone
| was graduating but I was the only person who failed in my
| senior year and was left behind.
| jonjon10002 wrote:
| Spent ten years at a Vista company that I won't name, half
| before acquisition and half after, and all of this pretty much
| tracks. (Maybe not the security guard part, but I can confirm
| that when you were laid off, you were escorted straight out the
| door.)
|
| I was a manager and hired people, and I never had a candidate
| who didn't pass the CCAT. But I'd have to qualify that with "a
| native speaker of English" and "in the US." I never hired in
| India or elsewhere overseas, but I heard from other managers
| that this could be a challenge, which makes me think the CCAT
| was a convenient way of weeding out "non-culture fits."
|
| As far as layoffs and CCATs, they layoff decisions were always
| a few steps above me in the org chart, but what I observed was
| that the last couple of rounds were very directly related to
| employee age. NOT tenure, although being there for 20 years
| meant you were on the chopping block to be replaced by a few
| HPELs. But I saw people who were 50+ and only around a few
| years get cut. Maybe it was due to salary, maybe not.
| Officially, it was due to "a formula" that included "several
| factors" because of course basing layoffs on age is illegal.
|
| Annual reviews were a bit bogus, because they were 1-5, with 1
| being you were actively involved in a felony against the
| company, 2 being you were on a PIP, and you couldn't give a 5
| to anyone. I would give a scattering of 3s and 4s, and then my
| boss's boss would say I had too many 4s, so effectively
| everyone was a 3, which doesn't do much for the "several
| factors." (It did play well into massively underfunding the
| bonus pool, though.)
|
| The only other part missing from your story is how between
| every layoff cycle, there would be a giant rumor that Broadcom
| or Oracle or someone was going to buy the company for the
| rolodex and real estate, and fire everyone they couldn't
| offshore.
| ndneighbor wrote:
| Used to work at Citrix for three years as a Product Manager. I
| empathize with most everyone's experience that they shared- at
| the tail end of my tenure, the company prioritized the sales
| teams over the engineering staff and unfortunately it showed
| within the product.
|
| I think when set up properly, Virtual Apps and Desktops is killer
| for having good access to desktops and at the moment is a good
| extension of Azure Virtual Desktop. However, it did feel like we
| were running the product with a skeleton crew. As a result,
| documentation fell by the wayside along with other matters. I
| guess complete PE takeover of this sort of company is inevitable.
| petemc_ wrote:
| Worked for a company that Citrix acquired a few years ago. They
| seemed to have went all in on something called Kepner-Tregoe. I
| left shortly after my week long training course, which I didn't
| get much out of other than a stay in a nice hotel. As I was
| leaving they were downsizing and one of their techniques was to
| match 2 people together and say "We will be comparing your
| performance against each other for the next 6 weeks, after that,
| the worst performer will be fired". Pretty awful.
| takanori wrote:
| What are Citrix and Tibco used for?
| Slaminerag wrote:
| Citrix does desktop virtualization. Back when I was involved
| with using their stuff (20 years ago), it was a lot faster for
| global users to connect to our Citrix server to run
| client/server apps than to run them over the WAN. Tibco
| does/did middleware for n-tier applications. Back when I used
| it (again 20 years ago) it worked, and was relatively painless.
| hestefisk wrote:
| Tibco is short for "the information bus company". They
| practically invented Enterprise integration in large
| businesses, esp stock exchanges and banks, with a need for
| high reliability. These days Tibco is largely considered
| "legacy". I'm surprised that VCs would see value in them
| apart from their Rolodex.
| avrionov wrote:
| Tibco is owned by Private Equity, not VCs. Very different
| type of companies. VCs own a company on its way up, PE onws
| its way down. Some times a company is sold immediately from
| VCs to PE. In some rear occasions a company owned by PE can
| go public: e.g. Dynatrace, TeamViewer.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yup. When I was a junior engineer, I was working for a bank
| and the various teams were all blaming each other about
| high latency in the stack, which involved Tibco Rendezvous.
| Basically, a way to distribute market data over multicast.
| They blamed Rendezvous, they blamed the network hardware,
| they blamed everything except their spreadsheets. (Yes, the
| tech stack at the time was spreadsheet <-> spreadsheet over
| multicast.) Anyway, I wrote a small Perl application that
| measured the end-to-end latency (when market data changed,
| vs when the published output changed) in addition to
| network induced latency (basically echo packets; write
| something out, see when it came back over the link). What
| the data showed was that the data processing spreadsheet
| introduced tons of random latency, and the network was
| totally fine. I sent that up the chain and the bug in the
| spreadsheet was found almost immediately, solving a multi-
| month blame game in hours.
|
| A little off topic but good memories.
| unmole wrote:
| Apart from virtualization, Citrix also sells Application
| Delivery Controllers i.e. a box you use for TLS offloading,
| load balancing and firewall.
| sakarisson wrote:
| pain
| apohn wrote:
| TIBCO has a lot of Analytics and Data products. One of their
| acquisitions, called Spotfire, is actually a really good
| product.
|
| Over the last few years they've also acquired a lot of Data
| Science companies, but it always felt like they were bargain
| shopping and acquiring companies nobody else wanted to buy.
|
| Honestly, I pity Spotfire. IME it's the best out of all the
| products in that space (e.g. Tableau, PowerBI, etc) and is much
| better for actually Analyzing data in comparison to other
| products it competes with. But they got acquired by TIBCO, who
| basically did a great job of losing the mindshare race against
| Tableau. I feel like some other company would have done a
| better job with Spotfire.
| consp wrote:
| For all those ranting a only partial rant: Citrix, I did use it
| once kind of without anger at it: to run an unpatched IE8
| instance to run an even older unpatched ASP (not .net)
| application (to run some ancient ERP software from BAAN) which I
| did get angry at.
| duck wrote:
| I interviewed at Citrix 20+ years ago for my first SWE job out of
| college. The first phone interview went well, but on the second
| one I was surprised to find the interviewer was asking the exact
| same questions, word for word. After a couple of them I mentioned
| it, thinking maybe this was a mistake and the interviewer said
| that wasn't the case, and then proceeded to ask me the rest of
| the same questions. After I told them the answer to the next
| question before they asked it there was a real long pause on
| their side and then they asked the remaining questions in a
| different order. Needless to say I wasn't as excited about
| working there after that, but they never called me back either.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| This is sometimes an anti-bias step these days.
|
| 20 years ago less likely.
| wnolens wrote:
| You found a glitch in the matrix
| rdtwo wrote:
| I hate citrix. It's such a shitty aggravating user experience.
| Sometimes in the middle of the night with no load it almost works
| ok but it's never good.
| easton wrote:
| In my experience this is almost always because your IT
| department budgeted terribly for their deployment and either
| didn't get GPUs for graphics or is overextending their setup.
|
| VDI should probably cost as much if not more than comparable
| workstations, but it's so much more convenient in the best
| case.
| rdtwo wrote:
| That's always the pitch that it's not setup correctly but if
| most users are experiencing it in the incorrect setup then
| maybe it's just the product. Like I said in no load it can be
| ok but never good. Sometimes the security might be a good
| trade off but only if users interact with the vdi rarely
| during their work day
| treeman79 wrote:
| It's Always fun to get a support ticket about how software
| X doesn't work. Look into it and opening up a browser is a
| multi minute task.
|
| Eventually started closing such tickets with "buy a real
| computer" or other snarky remarks.
| lima wrote:
| It's terrible even with GPU.
|
| VDI can die in a fire.
| gbrown_ wrote:
| We have a bunch of HDX 3D Pro VDIs at my current place and
| I second this.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| A lot of times the issues are disk IO, 500 desktops all
| booting up and end-users opening applications at around
| 9:00am is a surprisingly huge amount of IO.
| [deleted]
| ulzeraj wrote:
| The installation wizard for workspace and realtime engine on
| macOS installs 6 or more background services as root which you
| don't actually need if your provider just gives you an ICA file
| to login.
| nikanj wrote:
| If you think the user experience is bad, you should try being a
| developer or sysadmin
| rdtwo wrote:
| I took a python class in a Citrix environment and It was
| incredibly aggravating. Watching code appear seconds after
| you type it fills you with so much rage. It's like zoom
| fatigue before zoom
| bmc7505 wrote:
| Elliott Management strikes again.
|
| https://lipperalpha.refinitiv.com/2021/09/breakingviews-elli...
| riffic wrote:
| ah, the same people who thought buying a large stake in TWTR
| was a good idea.
| anonporridge wrote:
| They seem to have succeeded in pushing Jack out.
|
| I assume we'll see some big changes in the near future, and
| I'm not hopeful that it will be positive for the platform.
| riffic wrote:
| they're holding bags. There's no ROI, with or without Jack.
|
| Twitter is this decade's AOL.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| I was confused about Twitter's business model from the
| very start. But, I didn't think Uber and Lyft made a lot
| of financial sense, either :P
|
| Usually what you'd do is pump the platform full of ads
| and then offer an ad-free option, or make it into a
| subscription service outright, but I don't think twitter
| has enough of a moat for the latter and won't be
| successful on the former.
| nikanj wrote:
| My developer experience with Citrix last year:
|
| 1) Contact Citrix support about some missing details in their SDK
| (Dynamic Virtual Channels were not loading properly on
| XenDesktop, and the SDK docs just said "Use the Microsoft APIs
| for registration")
|
| 2) Citrix ponders about the issue for a few months. I write a
| full DVC plugin for them to test things with, because they don't
| seem to have anyone in-house who knows their own tech stack
|
| 3) Citrix finally declares that dynamic virtual channels are
| currently broken. They might get fixed in a future release, but
| they're not on the active roadmap.
|
| 4) Citrix is still releasing frequent updates to the SDK,
| advertising DVC support. NB this is not just a small typo in the
| docs, they have a long chapter dedicated to the topic ( Citrix
| Dynamic Virtual Channel Protocol at
| https://github.com/citrix/receiver-for-windows-virtual-chann...
| ). The feature is very thoroughly documented, it's just...not
| actually implemented.
|
| I can't imagine how many developer hours get wasted yearly with
| people trying to get virtual channels to work, when in reality
| they're just flat-out not supported.
| hermitdev wrote:
| That largely mirrors my experience with IBM's DB2 Connect
| software on Windows ~20 years ago. Follow the install
| documentation to the letter, it doesn't work. Contact support.
|
| Months of follow ups later and:
|
| IBM: "this isn't a supported configuration."
|
| Me: "But, it's documented as a supported configuration."
|
| IBM: "It has been removed from the latest documentation."
|
| Me: "And when was that published?"
|
| IBM: "Tomorrow"
|
| Even after getting a DB2 Connect install working, it was a
| nightmare then dealing with their compatibility flags, which
| changed with every fixpack. Want feature A to work? Set the
| flag for it...but, you'll lose features B & C if you do that...
|
| (edit: formatting)
| nikanj wrote:
| It's bizarre how companies reach a certain size, and they
| seem to lose all developers. There's the clueless helpdesk
| and the marketing/sales org, but nobody seems to be writing
| code / fixing issues anymore.
|
| In my experience, contacting a 10-person company about a bug
| means that a dev is going to look at the issue in a day or
| two. Contacting a 10 000 person company about a bug means
| that a dev will never see the bug - unless they happen to be
| browsing Reddit and see someone complaining about it
| alexashka wrote:
| It's only bizarre if you haven't lived a while.
|
| It's actually quite normal. Notice how most things posted
| on HackerNews are neither News, nor about Hacking.
|
| It's normal, that things morph into some lowest common
| denominator 'thing' that makes people that have any taste
| shudder on the inside. It doesn't make most everyone else
| shudder, which is why it is almost inevitable, reduction to
| the lowest common denominator, of everything.
| jordanbeiber wrote:
| Building new things is seen as business risk, I reckon.
|
| This is why startups or VC backed things can explode, and
| innovate, but once you IPO, innovation is not what's
| important - it's about perspective I guess.
|
| When the death spiral of anti-innovation starts, people
| such as talented developers start to drop off, and in the
| end you'll have a slow, bureaucratic mess of an org,
| sustained by the inertia of an already existing customer
| base.
|
| "How about we yank up them licensing fees?!", or my
| favorite "Let's rename a product suite!" (Citrix, as a case
| in point, is notorious for this...)
|
| This be the enterprise IT lifecycle.
| jedberg wrote:
| The developers are there but they are so far removed from
| the customer experience that it seems like they aren't.
| Large companies don't like developers talking directly with
| customers because they tend to speak frankly and honestly.
| nikanj wrote:
| Or, heavens forbid, offer help for free. "Oh hey yeah
| that's like 10 lines of code, I'll put in the next
| service pack"
|
| Nnnnnoooooooo -sales org
| rjzzleep wrote:
| Recent Fortune 500 contracting experience I had:
|
| Ubuntu was to be introduced into the company. The team was
| 1 developer and 4 managers. When we asked for collaboration
| with the developer the manager kept saying "we don't do
| this" "it's not a supported configuration".
|
| The developer defied his direct superior and offered
| collaboration and as a result was removed from the project.
|
| Now the project staff was 4 managers and 0 developers.
|
| The manager claimed he was doing this to protect his
| developer from overwork, but really it was just about his
| own ego.
|
| A lot of the projects I saw there were basically 1 engineer
| and a couple of managers of some sort. Security manager,
| Project Manager, Portfolio Manager, some medium management
| and some other people. And then they would constantly say
| that they don't have resources to fix things. Well yeah,
| because you have 1 engineer for 10 projects, but 4 managers
| per project.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > IBM's DB2 Connect software on Windows ~20 years ago
|
| So many really middling memories just came flooding back.
| exikyut wrote:
| I wonder if some large account acquisition somewhere somehow
| wound up contingent on implementing this functionality... but
| technical due diligence during the integration process
| identified that it was absolutely irrelevant... and it was
| subsequently declared that it was easier to just pretend the
| feature exists to keep the middle-manglement happy because the
| account was important.
|
| Maybe. Going fishing in thin air here.
| nikanj wrote:
| Maybe. But it does work on XenApp, which is their somewhat-
| deprecated non-vdi offering :D
| cyanydeez wrote:
| we call this vendor lock in. RIP
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Good for them; Azure Virtual Desktop and Amazon Workspaces are
| both pretty mature offerings that absolutely blow Citrix out of
| the water on cost, performance and functionality. It's one of
| those rare use cases where autoscaling in the public cloud with
| some lightweight management tools is an unreasonably effective
| solution by nearly every available metric.
| snuxoll wrote:
| I can't speak for Amazon Workspaces, but Azure Virtual Desktop
| by itself is a _terrible_ experience. Citrix provides a pretty
| large value-add for AVD in particular: FAS + Azure AD
| integration means a user just needs to sign into their local
| (Windows) system and that 's it, they're automatically signed
| into Storefront or Citrix Cloud through their Azure AD PRT and
| then FAS signs them into their VDI system when they connect.
| Add on HDX, support for things like FIDO2 redirection, etc. and
| I would say the exact opposite of you.
| krageon wrote:
| The enterprise integration on Citrix can be good, but really
| I think the conversation was about what it is like to
| actually use it.
| snuxoll wrote:
| I mean, using it's fine too if you're not like so many
| organizations that vastly over-provision their
| infrastructure. I did a PoC with Citrix Cloud (Azure,
| Windows 10 multi-session) prior to us rolling it out for a
| family practice location and was rather impressed with the
| performance when using Standard_D4a_v4 instances - round
| trip latency metrics available in Citrix Studio showed
| around 60ms from keypress to update and my eyeballs would
| back that up.
|
| I've also used VDI setups that were miserable with heavily
| over-provisioned CPU resources and 2-vCPU's per VM. The
| experience really is dictated by the hardware you allocate.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I have fiber with 6ms ping to our windows machines, RDP
| connection. I've tried a few times to get these VDI setups close
| to matching what I have now and I can't. Either RDP is amazing,
| naked hardware is amazing, or VDI is a dog. I'm willing to pay.
| olyjohn wrote:
| I still haven't found anything better than RDP. Back when
| Windows was my primary work machine, I could bring it home,
| plug it into power, shut the lid, toss it up on a shelf and
| still RDP into it, and use all of my monitors. And it ran as
| good as local. Still haven't found anything that compares to it
| in any way. VNC always just gives you the resolution of the
| host's desktop. Plus it's always just some screen capture into
| a video codec.
|
| Ok, well back in the day, I would say X11 was actually far
| better than that. Over dialup, it would blow away RDP
| performance-wise.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| My only experience with Citrix is their GoToMeeting app/service.
| It's probably the most aggravating meeting software I've ever
| used. From almost everyone else's comments here, GoToMeeting
| seems to be their best piece of software.
|
| Edit: formerly? LogMeIn owns it now:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoToMeeting
| vosper wrote:
| GoToMeeting is just as bad under LogMeIn as it was under
| Citrix. It's barely changed in years so I assume no resources
| are being invested and they're just milking the revenue until
| it eventually dies.
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Spare a prayer for us tortured souls who need to work with
| Workspace and HDX Realtime Engine.
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