Cutting edge IT companies, the story of Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. was founded in 1989 by former IBM members, in Texas. Citrix is a software company that specializes in selling subscriptions and perpetual licenses that increase the productivity in the workplace. Its core products are desktop applications, performance optimizer services, networking etc. Citrix sells a huge variety of products that go from consulting services until cloud offerings or products related with ADCs (Application Delivery Controllers, providing security and access to applications at peak times).

The company has a very powerful workspace application, building up a workspace software that has been a success in the market, being useful for several reasons. The first one is the fact that it allows the user to access information from several desktop and mobile devices through a single sign on only. The platform also allows the access of information from many users to such inter-connected workspace and, for this reason, companies have incentives to incur in costs: all its employees have access to the same application. Plus, the platform has already become a full cloud service, maintaining its high performance. Despite all the benefits, there are some drawbacks, such as the fact that Citrix has set a fixed cost for the access to the application equivalent to a minimum number of users of 25 employees.

In addition to its very strong and now cloud-based workspace application, Citrix has also broadened its core business into the cloud industry. In fact, such vision is already very old: the investment of the company into the cloud area goes back into 2007 when Citrix acquired Xensource for $500 million, a data centre virtualisation company. In 2011, the company also bought Cloud.com, a cloud computing startup. The company is getting revenues from, for instance, its own automated migration tools to the Google Cloud, guaranteeing security and protection from malicious software.

Moreover, the company provides services of support for customers to manage application delivery more easily from the cloud. With Amazon Web Services, for example, Citrix moves workloads managed by existing on-premises ADCs to an ADC in the AWS system.

If in this third quarter of 2020 subscription revenues for its applications amounted to $1.03 billion, its Software as a Service business has rendered $630 million.

In the past day of October 29, the company announced a unified approach to guarantee further security of its services. With the recent pandemic, the growing tendency to work from home and the increasing number of cyber-attacks, the company’s workspace application and cloud core is also moving further into the cyber-security market.

By João Pedro Costa