Citrix is for sale. Possible buyer is Dell. Discuss!

Last week, Reuters reported that Citrix is trying to sell itself outright instead of slicing itself up into parts and selling those as Elliott Management wants to do. They say Citrix has reached out to Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.

Last week, Reuters reported that Citrix is trying to sell itself outright instead of slicing itself up into parts and selling those as Elliott Management wants to do. They say Citrix has reached out to Dell and private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. (Silver Lake was the company that partnered with Michael Dell to take Dell private. They also helped buy Skype from eBay which they then sold to Microsoft.)

Sooooo…. what do you think?

Citrix + Dell = Deltrix?

First thing that pops into my mind is that of course Dell wants to build a big software business. That’s why they bought Quest. Of course Dell already has a lot of products that Citrix has. Their vWorkspace Suite competes against XenDesktop/XenApp, and they have mobile management solutions that compete against XenMobile.

Of course Dell’s current desktop virtualization and mobile management tools are not market leaders (at least not in terms of market share), so I could see the value of bringing Citrix on board. And Dell can probably fix a lot of the problems Citrix has now (product quality, broken sales compensation model, talent flight, general gloom and malaise, etc.).

I would imagine this would mean they’d essentially shut down vWorkspace and migrate any unique IP into XenDesktop/XenApp?

It would be kind of weird though because Dell also owns Wyse, so that would mean that Citrix and Wyse would be the same company. Where does that leave HP and the other thin client vendors?

Heck, where does that leave HP and the other *server* vendors? Will HP want to partner with Citrix for selling Citrix solutions? Will that drive HP to VMware? (Though with HP's split and servers being in one company and thin clients in the other, HP is kind of a mess right now when it comes to desktop virtualization, so I guess they have more important issues to sort out first?)

Speaking of VMware, what would a combined Dell+Citrix relationship look like for them? Dell and VMware do a lot of business together now. Would this mean that VMware would be less interested in pushing Dell?

Of course this has been the case for years since Dell owns vWorkspace, but Dell has managed that by not being in-you-face about marketing vWorkspace and treading lightly around both Citrix and VMware. (vWorkspace is kind of the great little product that just sits there in the background that they never talk about.)

Maybe VMware buys Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft buys Dell+Citrix, and then we only have two huge companies to deal with in the desktop virtualization space?

On a personal note, we did a campaign with Dell last year called “Take your life back” which was about using Dell, Citrix, and Intel to make your desktop virtualization life easier. That was a fun campaign (my favorite video from it is below), except it was kind of a pain because we had to work with three separate vendors with three separate sets of ideas, approvals, timeframes, etc. A huge pain! So if Dell buys Citrix, then hey, that means we only have to deal with two different vendors instead of three, so that sounds good to me! :)

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How about Microsoft just buy them up, selling off NetScaler and the Goto Stuff to Dell?


Citrix is going to go private in my opinion like Dell did and get rid of the wallstreet non-sense just like Dell did.  There was actually an article Brian from either late last week or this week that the talks between Dell and Citrix were about going private, not a sale.  I agree GoTo products really don't fit so that makes sense to divest those.  


From 4 years ago this month...


Over/under this actually becomes reality? I am definitely don't think Dell will be the suitor but would venture to guess it is a matter of time before someone bits...

BTW, my prediction is Citrix will sell off GoToMeeting, Podio, Grasshopper and ByteMobile and then Elliot will force them to go private.

I feel like VMware and Citrix should just bury the hatchet, merge and become a software powerhouse! VMware and Citrix biggest competitor are not each other but rather MSFT (my opinion).

More information on Citrix/Elliot:


Let us not forget... Elliot is ruthless and only cares about their shareholders.



Dell (hopefully) will never buy CItrix. I agree... Cisco would make sense, but EMC/VMware would be interesting as well.


If Dell bought them, the implications would be far reaching.  Of course we have several reference architectures at HP for Citrix solutions but we also have the Moonshot HDI solution that is exclusively based on XenDesktop.  We also have several services that are based on Citrix products.  

Obviously it would really shake things up in a major way.  


I think the CTX/VMW merger would be an interesting one.....they could fire the 1000's of FUD merchants in both companies who constantly snipe at each other and pay for the merger with the proceeds.

I think VMW has gained great momentum right now in the EUC space and Citrix has lost an equal amount....the best of both companies products (EUC and SDDC) would be a killer combo.


Disclaimer - I work for Dell

I think Dell buying the NetScaler part of the business would make some sense, its a gap in the networking portfolio that is cannibalized by F5.  


I'm just a dumb *** BUT I'm a dumb *** with an opinion. For a long time I've wondered why Microsoft haven't bought Citrix yet. My bet is on them. They seem to suggest RDS is ok for small companies and Citrix is for large Enterprise. They've cow towed to Citrix in certain areas and likewise, Citrix have cow towed to them e.g. Scrapping XenApp Profiling and integrating App-V...XenApp Connector for SCCM etc. etc.

It has to be Microsoft, doesn't it? Citrix brings value to them as a partner. They would be stupid to risk losing them.


Disclaimer - I also happily work for Dell.

All I'll say is that a Dell buying Citrix would make our relationship with VMW complex.  One of our huge strengths is that we're such major partners with both CTX and VMW, they both have outstanding products.


Now what about these rumors, Dell buying EMC

Then they will own VMware, so way buy Citrix?

Maybe they will buy both EMC (VMware) and Citrix ;-) :-/ :-/