With synergy approaching and my own excitement steadily building, I ended up in a lively debate with a number of twitter friends over the weekend with hopes for Citrix to emerge from their slump or sleepy slumber. This conversation was observed and commented on by many, with a good portion of snark and pessimism.
Pessimism? Yeah, sure, Citrix has had a pretty poor year. Staffing cuts, stock drops, sales / profit warnings, some of the industries largest names jumping ship to their VMware and competitors really driving up efforts. Citrix are aware of their position and they’ve been fairly quiet. I’ve seen great humility this year in even ‘the smuggest’ of Citrites, only at the start of this year, for the first time in my ten year affair with Citrix products and features, did I hear a VP during a customer briefing mention their competitors during a keynote. As with nature, any sign of weakness is always preyed on by competitors.
Speaking of the valid competitors. VMware are being respectfully aggressive. Really, respectfully aggressive and not only are they taking a machete to the feature parity gap between Horizon and XenDesktop, they’re also adding serious value (App Volumes, Immidio, etc) in ways that Citrix couldn’t do today. They caught Citrix during a weak spot in their desktop virtualisation transformation, but more on that later.
