() is an
American technology company, based in
Fort Lauderdale ,
Florida , with
Subsidiary operations in
California and
Massachusetts , with additional development centers in
Australia ,
India and the
UK . Citrix delivers
Software and services to secure and optimized delivery of corporate and web-based applications. This means Citrix specializes in thin client, terminal services and remote access software that allow organizations to conveniently manage and deliver applications over the network and over the Internet.
Citrix was founded in
1989 by ex-
IBM developer
Ed Iacobucci . Citrix was originally named Citrus but changed its name after an existing company claimed trademark rights. The Citrix name is a
Portmanteau of Citrus and
UNIX . Many of the original founding members had participated in the IBM
OS/2 project. Iacobucci's vision was to build OS/2 with multi-user support. IBM was not interested in this idea; Iacobucci left to form his own company with two partners, who departed shortly thereafter. Citrix was originally headquartered in
Richardson ,
Texas , but within a few months relocated 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, bypassing IBM. Citrix hoped to capture part of the UNIX market by making it easy to deploy text-based OS/2 applications. The product failed to find a market, and the company had to adjust their business plan. Citrix devoted considerable resources to identifying the requirements of potential customers and introduced WinView, Citrix's first successful product, in 1993. WinView saved the company from bankruptcy. By providing remote access to DOS and Windows 3.1 applications on a multi-user platform, WinView addressed many customer concerns.
Microsoft licensed the source code of its
Windows NT to Citrix, and in 1995 Citrix began to sell WinFrame, a stand-alone system based on Windows NT 3.51 (MultiWin).
In 1991, Citrix chairman and co-founder Ron Brittan appointed Roger Roberts as CEO. Between 1991 and 1995, the company was not turning a profit. Roberts chose to invest his life savings in the company to keep it solvent and assumed liability for all corporate debts. With less than 30 days of operating funds left, Iacobucci and Roberts were able to convince Microsoft to invest 1 million dollars into Citrix. Had Microsoft not invested in Citrix, the company would have closed.
In December 1995, Citrix went public (CTXS on NASDAQ), with employees of the company holding 30% of the stock. Many Citrix employees who invested in the company sold thousands of shares within the first 24 hours and received a profitable return to their investments, as the stock doubled in value on its first trading day.
Citrix licensed all of NT 3.51 and made changes to make it multi-user. It then shipped a full but different version of NT 3.51 and called it WinFrame. With the success of WinFrame and the momentum behind the increasingly popular Windows NT 3.51 in the corporate software market, the stock and outlook of Citrix became strong
Early in 1997, Citrix was again threatened by its success. Microsoft no longer wanted Citrix to ship its version of NT and wanted this software created in-house. As a result, Citrix stock plummeted. Microsoft threatened to create their own independent version of Citrix and later, Microsoft withdrew their license of NT 4.0 from Citrix. Microsoft did invest into its own solution and formed two teams. The first team created an in-house solution and the second team resulted from the acquisition of France-based company Prologue. The resulting products were inadequate because the graphics subsystem was moved into the kernel in NT 4.0. Microsoft was only able to support up to 5 users with its solution while Citrix could support upwards of 180 users. Citrix's solution was the result of 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. The concept was patented under patents 6023749 and 5913230 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 was boxed in; if it could not release WinFrame 2.0 based on the NT 4.0 source license, there was no future for the company in this niche. Citrix agreed not to ship a competing product but retained "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.
By 2001, the tension felt between Ed Iacobucci and the driving forces of the company became too great. Iacobucci and the board clashed repeatedly, as he requested more power and the board refused his requests. Iacobucci, recognizing he would never become the CEO, departed Citrix.
At the same time that Iacobucci left Citrix, the CEO
Mark Templeton stood aside. The search for a new CEO to replace Templeton began, headed by 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).
In December 2003, Citrix acquired Expertcity of
Santa Barbara, CA , 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, Citrix bought a
San Jose , CA, company,
Net6 2, for a total of $50 million dollars in cash and stock.
In June 2005, Citrix acquired Netscaler
3, a Santa Clara, CA, company that manufactured network appliances that offered load balancing and application delivery acceleration, for a total of $300 million in cash and stock. Continuing its lengthy buying spree, in November 2005 Citrix purchased Teros
4, a privately-held Sunnyvale, CA firm that produced web application firewalls, for $27 million in cash and stock. The acquisitions of Net6, NetScaler, and Teros 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 on
August 7 2006 they acquired Orbital Data for about $55 million in order to enter the WAN optimization market. Orbital Data was founded in 2002 and is based in
San Mateo ,
California .
In December 2006, Citrix announced an agreement to acquire
Ardence Inc. enabling on demand provisioning for application delivery.
5
In August 2007, Citrix announced the acquisition of
XenSource , developers of the open source virtualization product Xen.
6 The acquisition is expected to be finalized in Q4 2007.
Citrix products are widely used in both public and private sectors. They are often deployed as a tactical choice to address limitations in critical applications, as well as a strategic choice to develop a centrally-managed or server-centric infrastructure.
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 .
In September, 2007, Citrix Systems, Inc. acquired QuickTree, a small privately-held software company.
In January 2007, Citrix launched the Citrix Ready initiative, a marketing component of the Citrix Global Alliance Partner program. Citrix claims to identify recommended solutions that are trusted to enhance the Citrix application delivery infrastructure. Through an online catalog and Citrix Ready branding program, customers can find and build a 'trusted' infrastructure to establish a supported, pre-tested baseline.
- WinFrame
- MultiWin
- Citrix MULTIUSER (Based on OS/2 1.x)
- Citrix WinView (Based on OS/2 2.x)
- Citrix VideoFrame
- Citrix NFuse Elite 1.0
- Citrix Extranet
- Citrix XPS Portal 3.5.1
- Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager
