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Citrix acquired and merged with Tibco for $16.5B
- random_kris 4y agoI've used Tibco jaspersoft I Ireport for dynamical pdf generation
- sabujp 4y agoSchwab still uses citrix for their streetsmart edge trading app
- fny 4y agoThe next decade is going to be heaven for M&A. Also, the yields on the bonds Citrix issued were eye-popping.
- arawde 4y agoAfaik 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
- svnt 4y agoThe WSJ reported on it: https://archive.ph/LVoGa https://archive.ph/LVoGa
- snake_doc 4y agoPE firms don’t issue debt for leveraged buyouts. The debt is issued by the target company, ie. Citrix. Citrix is responsible for servicing the debt, not the PE firm.
- johnebgd 4y agoPart of the way M&A activity destroys companies. Not that anyone would miss Citrix except for their open source contributions, even if they are pared down.
- sidewndr46 4y agoIsn't this what ultimately took Toys R' Us down? The company actually had huge revenues, but after paying all it debtors could no longer actually make money.
- fny 4y agoBuyouts don't need to be leveraged.
- chadash 4y agoCan you elaborate on why conditions will be good for M&A?
- svnt 4y agoI’m also interested to hear why. Maybe if you are consolidating unfundable companies by force?
- bluepizza 4y agoGood companies with decent long term prospects strapped for cash and with heavy debt will be all over the place, being bought for heavy discounts to avoid completely closing down.
- bombcar 4y agoAnd larger companies with war chests of cash will be looking for things to prop up the revenue lines.
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- osamagirl69 4y agoI wonder if this will affect the open core XenServer project. backstory: Citrix has been releasing a community version of their xenserver product (based on the open source Xen project) but over the last few years they have been removing features from the open core version, going so far as to remove Xen from the name in late 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15974615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15974615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19479483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19479483
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- gwd 4y agoRemoving Xen from the name had nothing directly to do with changing the model for Xen Server; all Citrix products were re-branded at the same time. You never know what corporations will do with products they're supporting, whether they're open-source or not. (Ask VMWare customers how they're feeling now, for instance.) But with open-source, if there's a large enough user base, someone can step in and take over the software to fill the gap -- and in fact, that's exactly what's happened with XenServer: the XCP-ng forked the open-source part of XenServer, and now Vates (the company behind XCP-ng) is actively collaborating with Citrix on future development. Removing features from "free XenServer" wouldn't really have that big of an impact on customers, since they'd almost certainly end up in XCP-ng anyway.
- osamagirl69 4y agoYes, I switched to XCP-ng in early 2017 and haven't looked back. While I am not super in love with Vates (and their incessant pushing of their saas products I have 0% chance of using) it is a great example of the GPL at work protecting users freedoms.
- ultra2d 4y agoAt a previous job I also made that switch. We already were running Xen Orchestra, so the offering of XCP-ng was a blessing. Later on we replaced XenApp with a default Microsoft set-up as that worked just as well. Took a trip down to memory lane and found this recent post which is very recognizable: "How Citrix dropped the ball on Xen ... according to Citrix" https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/30/citrix_xen/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/30/citrix_xen/
- noitpmeder 4y agoMaybe they can fix the crapshoot that is Tibco-Rendevous (RV)
- djbebs 4y agoIs it really that bad? When i worked it it i quite liked it
- Rebelgecko 4y agoOr Tibco Smartsockets
- avrionov 4y agoThis article explains some of the background and how the banks lost money on the deal: https://prospect.org/power/griftrix-citrix-systems-debt-deal-private-equity/ https://prospect.org/power/griftrix-citrix-systems-debt-deal...
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoThanks, I just threw up in my mouth. I see where the French Revolutionaries were coming from.
- pas 4y agothough french revolutionists were merchants, traders, relatively well-off folks, you could even say private equity dudes of that era :)
- robertlagrant 4y agoAren't Tibco EAI? Why are they buying Citrix?
- avrionov 4y agoTIBCO is not buying Citrix. Vista and Elliot bought Citrix and merged it with TIBCO which was owned by Vista.
- robertlagrant 4y agoAh okay thanks for the clarification. Makes more sense.
- hownottowrite 4y agoWhat year did I wake up in? Is this 2005?
- guyzero 4y ago2005 BC more like
- enw 4y ago
- eyegouging 4y ago
- scarface74 4y agoWhat’s sad is that we live in a time that I don’t know whether this is a joke or is it serious.
- VoodooJuJu 4y agoI 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.
- glandium 4y agoI 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]"
- curiousgal 4y agoAnyone who has worked in a large company/bank knows who they are.
- Krasnol 4y agoWorked at a F500 company. Never heard of those.
- timc3 4y agoDoesn't exactly qualify you for knowing about IT software.
- disordinary 4y ago
- jiggawatts 4y agoFeels 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 with a colourful WYSIWYG Windows application overlaid on top of the standard UNIX applications. I would always respond to the queries about how this was working with: "Magic." Now? Three large customers are winding their Citrix deployments down. Feels like working with Novell products in the early 2000s.
- atdrummond 4y agoReminds me exactly of the old Netware days and their winddown.
- avrionov 4y agoIt is not going to be good. The combined company had to pay back $16.5B. Just the interest will be $1B per year.
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- newaccount2021 4y ago
- ralph84 4y agoI remember my dad installing Citrix on our home PC with 28.8 kbps modem in the mid-90s so he could occasionally "telecommute", as working remotely was called back then. It really did seem like magic that he could run all of the Windows apps on his work PC from home.
- elguyosupremo 4y agoIt'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.
- newobj 4y agoAny old school Amazon-ers here cringing when they hear the name "Tibco"?
- lamontcg 4y agoTibco rvd and UDP multicast crushing switch buffers and falling back to UDP unicast to crush them even harder during the ramp up to Christmas.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoAs the submission title is confusing (who acquired whom?): Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Announce the Completion of the Transaction to Acquire Citrix Systems and Combine it with TIBCO Software.
- hestefisk 4y agoAnyone who has experience working with Tibco’s service bus? After all their name is short for “the information bus company”. I have seen their product deployed in many banks and exchanges but never heard anything good or bad about it from a developer standpoint.
- yuan43 4y ago> AUSTIN, Texas, & MENLO PARK, Calif. – September 30, 2022 – Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”), a leading global investment firm focused exclusively on enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses, and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. (“Evergreen”), an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management L.P. (together with its affiliates, collectively, “Elliott”), today announced the successful completion of their previously announced transaction to acquire Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS) (“Citrix”) and combine it with TIBCO Software (“TIBCO”). What role is Vista playing here? It's not clear why that company is necessary or even involved. It sounds like Vista is the owner of both entities and plans to sell the combined unit at some point.
- joschmo 4y agoBackground 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 making it difficult for Vista to exit their investment. TIBCO has been perpetually on the market for sale since 2017. Vista's "solution"? Vista managed to push a portion of the equity to Evergreen (Elliott Management's PE arm), and are building a Broadcom or CA Technologies style mammoth of legacy software by calcifying their technology in F500 and low-technology end markets. Their next merger to further feed the beast is Citrix. Today's problem? The merger requires billions in debt to pay Citrix's public shareholders, which is put on the merged company's new balance sheet. The market was great when the deal was signed almost a year ago and when the large banks signed up to syndicate (sell to smaller investors) the entire debt balance. Unfortunately, as the debt syndication process was underway, the market turned and the typical investors in these huge tranches of LBO debt were no longer interested. That means the big banks were left to fill the balance of what they couldn't syndicate (contractual requirement) by taking on that bad paper themselves. It's bad paper because the banks commit to the LBO investors they'll get the investors to sign up at a 4% interest rate when any investor would probably ask for 7.5-9% now. Believe 8-10 banks are stuck holding something like $2-3 billion. The Resolution. Deal got done and the LBO investors forced the banks to eat the losses. Now this black hole of a company will continue to grow until it gets foisted on a company like Broadcom or IBM that would be happy to churn out billions in cash from it. PE firms win. Merged company wins. Banks lose. Employees will lose as massive waves of layoffs are done to "eliminate redundancies" because they won't need two complete HR, finance, IT, legal, etc. teams. And billions in cash flow will be generated as a result.
- gumby 4y agoThanks! I was wondering how TIBCO could possibly still be around.
- whydoyoucare 4y agoAnd I was wondering how Tom Krause heads the combined company (he was leading Broadcom's software arm until a few months ago!)
- jmbwell 4y agoCitrix is far less of a company than it was not long ago. It is responsible in no small part for what we know today as remote desktop and VDI, it had all the Goto products, including GoToMeeting, and of course Xen. Many of these products hit the market before people knew what they were for… “why would I want virtual desktops, why would I want virtual meetings…” Some of it was awkward to use, but arguably only because it was such an early entrant. But lately, it has been unraveling, shedding the Goto line and all the related voice and video and collaboration products to LogMeIn… Microsoft now offers most of what Citrix once had exclusive. And now, … well, here we are. No love lost with me, really, but it does seem like a landmark in enterprise computing history.
- floatinglotus 4y agoTwo ancient pieces of software, together at last.
- EastSmith 4y agoI knew of Tibco from an "Ajax IDE" they built gazilian years ago, from the time when there was a site called Ajaxian. Lol.
- Melatonic 4y agoI never want to touch Citrix again. Dear. God. Their licensing reps are also the shadiest of vendors EVER
- brun 4y agoShady like trying to upsell as much as possible?
- robocat 4y agoTibco 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_edition/3.9.2/TIB_gi-enterprise_3.9.2_relnotes.pdf?id=1 https://docs.tibco.com/pub/general_interface_enterprise_edit...
- slt2021 4y agoPE companies are putting lipstick on a pig that is Cloud Software Group, to unload this mammoth company on IPO bagholders in one-two years. CEO just needs to aggressively outsource all software development (their leadership page https://www.cloud.com/leadership.html https://www.cloud.com/leadership.html gives some hints) to cut costs and boost bottom-line for two years, so that numbers look nicer in IPO prospect one-two years from now.
- lemax 4y agoCan 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?
- usr1106 4y agoMyself I "grew up" in an X11 and Sun "the network is the computer" world. Have not used Citrix more than an hour, but my interpretation was that Citrix made a (huge) business out of Microsoft completely missing the network in the 90s. Both LAN and Internet. So yeah, they allow you to access a Windows computer over the net. Windows still exists so the business continues. For Tibco I have no equivalent story to tell. Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIBCO_Software https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIBCO_Software gives an idea.
- Slaminerag 4y agoTibco does/did middleware. When I used it 20 odd years ago, it provided a robust messaging system for apps across the enterprise. We used it to communicate between a half dozen systems where I worked as well as the middleware for the n-tier app I worked on, and it was pretty easy to use.
- hailwren 4y agoWe used Citrix at an old corporate job. It was an all-in-one corporate networking solution. We had 2fA keys and logins and citrix was the entire IP(Intellectual Property)-protection networking + vpn layer.
- scaramanga 4y agoFor Citrix, it was XenServer, XenClient, and XenDesktop when I was there? Also Go2Meeting, and a few other other stuff like that.
- jzwinck 4y ago
- thrwwybaD45 4y agoFormer employee in a certain Mediterranean ofc here. This was the most toxic env I've put myself through. Zero regrets on leaving apart from not going earlier. Some good people there. Some technically apt as well. But the amount of arses and backstabing minions is staggering. I've never before or after felt so bullied by my own coworkers. What they lacked in skills the made up in politics and gaslighting. And it was much like that in all levels. Busy working, busy empty talking, bullshiting and politics oh so much politics that it would make a notmal person throw up. Anyway i gtfo with clear PTSD and I should probably seek councelling as I'm afraid it shows at my current job. PS: i've been through a few companies in rough waters. It's always the same story. Nobody loves the company. And if you dare do something about it you are treated as enemy. All the entrenched actors treat it like a cow to be milked till it dies. And when it finally dies they act so surprised and sad...untill they get the severance package.
- WhompingWindows 4y agoWhat does TIBCO do? Well, I know their product WebFocus, curious if anyone else here uses it. It's basically an online platform for making charts, dashboards, scheduling data extracts for clients, etc. I'm in the healthcare domain, we use WebFocus to power a bunch of clinicians' products. I will say, I think the product's technical underpinning is not ideal. Instead of just using SQL, they have a proprietary language built in which has similarities to SQL but is much less easy to read and use. For instance a lot is stored in Metadata tables that are many clicks away from the report they're referencing. Also, there are a few cryptic keywords and things specific to WebFocus, which is obviously not that widely used and doesn't have many S.O. posts about it. So you're left staring at some various mysterious keywords or specific-syntax and thinking, do I learn anything more about this than what I need to, since this product is probably not going to last and will end up in the dust-bin like many other proprietary products. And it's just not a very employable skill like SQL. Overall, I don't like WebFocus, I think Tableau must be a couple notches better. But hey, my org is under-staffed and we don't have the manpower to change systems, so we're stuck with this.