Citrix Systems
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Citrix logo.

Citrix Systems NASDAQ: CTXS is a U.S. technology company, based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with subsidiary operations in the UK, Australia and India. Citrix is primarily a software company, but does have a hardware offering since its acquisition of Net6 in late 2004 and of NetScaler/Teros in 2005. Citrix offers a suite of products that are intended to provide secure access to applications and content from a wide range of clients.

Early History

Citrix was founded in 1989 by ex-IBM developer Ed Iacobucci. Citrix was originally called Citrus but needed to change its name after an existing company claimed trademark rights. Many of the original founding members were from the IBM OS/2 project. Ed's vision was to build OS/2 with multi-user support. IBM was not interested in this idea so Ed decided to leave to form his own company. There were two other founders besides Ed but the other two left before Citrix became successful. The first office was in Richardson, Texas, but moved shortly thereafter to Coral Springs, Florida. The company's first product was Citrix MULTIUSER, which was based on OS/2. Citrix licensed the OS/2 source from Microsoft instead of asking IBM. Citrix hoped to capture part of the UNIX market by making it easy to deploy text-based OS/2 applications. This original thinking did not pan out and it was necessary to re-adjust the plans. Citrix spent much more time listening to what customers wanted and WinView was a result of that change. It was Citrix's first successful product. It came at a dark time in 1993 when it looked like the company would not survive. WinView changed the tide and providing remote access to DOS and Windows 3.1 applications on a multi-user platform proved to address many customer concerns. Microsoft licensed the source code of NT to Citrix, and in 1995 Citrix began to sell WinFrame, a stand-alone system based on Windows NT 3.51 (MultiWin).


IPO

Citrix went public in December 1995 as CTXS on NASDAQ. Citrix stock doubled the first day. Many Citrix employees did very well that day. Options now meant something. With the success of WinFrame and the momentum behind Windows NT 3.51, the future of Citrix looked bright. It is important to mention that Citrix had licensed all of NT 3.51 and made changes to make it multi-user. Citrix was shipping a full but different version of NT 3.51 and calling it WinFrame. The core work was done by just a few engineers over the period of about 1/2 years.


Microsoft deal and early relationship

Early in 1997, Citrix was again threatened by the very success it was having. Microsoft no longer wanted Citrix to ship its own version of NT. Microsoft wanted this task (multi-user Windows NT) in house. The stock plummeted and people were very worried about the future. Microsoft was threatening to do the work on their own independent of Citrix and Microsoft withdrew the license to NT 4.0 from Citrix. Microsoft did invest into its own solution and formed two teams. The first was an in-house solution and the second was from an acquisition of a France based company named Prologue. The result was inadequate due to the graphics subsystem being moved into the kernel in NT 4.0. Microsoft was only able to demonstrate up to 5 users with its solution while Citrix could demonstrate upwards of 180 users. This was due to the work of John Richardson who invented Session Space. Session space helps isolate and share a range of kernel memory between user sessions in the same manner as user mode processes do. This can be found as patents #6,023,749 and #5,913,230 in the US Patents Database.

Later negotiations led to Microsoft agreeing to license Citrix technology for Windows NT Server 4.0, resulting in Windows Terminal Server Edition. Citrix felt pressured to either sell or die. If it could not release WinFrame 2.0 based on the NT 4.0 source license, there was no future for Citrix in this space. Citrix agreed not to ship a competing product but retained a set of "enterprise-level functionality" which it could sell as an extension to Microsoft's products. This add-on was initially sold under the name 'MetaFrame.' This complementary relationship continued into the Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 eras, with Citrix offering Metaframe XP and Presentation Server. The core technology that Microsoft did not buy was the ICA protocol. Microsoft bought another company to provide the backbone of the RDP (T.share) protocol that they currently use. Many rumors passed through Citrix that Microsoft had considered buying Citrix but by this point Citrix was too big (capitialization) and Microsoft was being too closely watched for anti-trust.


Ed's Departure and Mark Templeton's resignation and return

By 2001, the tension felt between Ed Iacobucci and the driving forces of the company became too great. Ed was effectively "selected" to leave the company he had started. His founding vision was strong enough to sustain the company for many years and even after he had left. Unfortunately Citrix never found another person to fill his role. He is now the founder of DayJet based in Delray Beach, Florida.

Most of Citrix's success can be attributed to Citrix MetaFrame, which is now called Citrix Presentation Server. Citrix now has many more products and aims to provide complete access for the full range of computer use in enterprise business. This covers the range all the way from the user's workstation up to the servers providing the remote applications. It also includes providing access for an Internet-based service that allows running remote meetings and accessing remote machines.

At the same time that Ed left Citrix the CEO Mark Templeton stood aside. The search for a new CEO to replace Mark began. In an odd twist the search was headed by Mark Templeton himself. Ultimately, a replacement was not found and Templeton returned as CEO. This period of the company's history was marked by a rapidly declining stock price (from over $120 USD to around 5 dollars).


Recent acquisitions and history

In December of 2003, Citrix acquired Expertcity of Santa Barbara, CA (founded 1997), developer of the Web-hosted portable desktop product GoToMyPC and online meeting platform GoToMeeting for $225 million, half cash and half stock.[1]. In November 2004, and June 2005, Citrix bought two San Jose, CA, companies, Net6[2] and Netscaler,[3] for a total of $350 million in cash and stock. This let Citrix diversify into the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Virtual Private Network (VPN) market space and into Application Delivery solutions. Additionally, Citrix is a business partner of Microsoft and is developing products that will link directly into the Microsoft Active Directory Domain Security Model.

In May 2006 Citrix completed the acquisition of Reflectent, giving them a product in the end-point management/monitoring market and then in August they acquired Orbital Data in order to enter the WAN optimization market.

Citrix products are now widely used in both public and private sectors, although they are often deployed as a tactical rather than a strategic choice. Claimed benefits include reduced direct and indirect costs (TCO), savings on application costs, reduced user downtime, improved user support and security. Citrix was awarded the Microsoft ISV of the Year award in 2005, for the second time in three years. Mark Templeton is the current President and Chief Executive Officer.


Products


Citrix Presentation Server (formerly Citrix MetaFrame)
Citrix Access Gateway (hardware offering based on acquired products from Net6 and NetScaler)
Citrix Password Manager
GoToAssist, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToMyPC
Citrix NetScaler Application Switch, Application Accelerator, and Application firewall
Citrix EdgeSight
Citrix Application Gateway