Split a company, lose jobs.
Merge/aquire, lose jobs.
Hmmmm....
Citrix has announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees as part of a corporate reshuffling that will also include spinning off its GoTo brand. The IT giant said it would be letting the GoTo family of products, including GoToMeeting, GoToAssist and GoToMyPC, cast off on their own as a standalone operation. Citrix said the spinoff …
Looks like the cold hand of Elliot "Management Corporation", whose MO seems to be to buy enough stock to get a seat on the board, sell off assets/remove staff and then fuck off with the profit.
Not exactly a long term way to run a business, but they don't care as they'll divest as soon as they've taken enough money out for themselves.
Between Microsoft improving basic RemoteApp for some scenarios, and the move of more "senior' desktop applications to web-based ones, I can see why Citrix might be caught in a negative feedback loop. Being owned by a cold-hearted asset stripping firm probably has something to do with it too.
The way this process has been done (again) shows that Citrix value their management and investors much more than their employees. The employees were told about this after the investor call, and the usual platitudes of "We'll treat our departing colleagues with respect and generosity" were trotted out, but going by the previous form, this means nothing.
I'll bet no-one from the senior management team will be in the 1000 people who are getting the boot though...
AC for rather obvious reasons.
Perfect acquisition target for Cisco now?
Obvious double up with WebEx and gotomeeting. Less of a problem with goto spun out I assume.
Cisco and Citrix have had a strong partnership on Netscaler since Cisco ace was canned.
Cisco also might want to get into the hyper visor market now with dell buying EMC?
Citrix is less than the sum of the acquired and merged parts. . The Netscaler business could easily stand alone and all the peripheral parts can be removed also. It does not take an asset stripper of Eliot proportions to figure this out. Equally, Citrix is massively middle management centric and generally employs a bunch of clowns in these places - UK and Northern EMEA being prime examples and consolidated by a Global VP of sales who seems to genuinely dislike customers and partners......
Also anonymous for obvious reasons.........