Moving to remote work over the past couple years may have vaulted video conferencing solutions like Zoom into the popular consciousness and culture, complete with memes, but there’s a lot more that went into enabling work from home than just video cameras and mute buttons. Many other companies were working more quietly in the background on the overnight transition.
For instance, Citrix, which announced this week that it would be taken private in an acquisition by a private equity firm, played a key role in enabling and securing enterprise organizations’ remote work efforts. Citrix said that Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital Corp. will acquire the company in an all-cash transaction valued at $16.5 billion, including the assumption of Citrix’s debt. The private equity firms plan to combine Citrix with data management, business intelligence, analytics, and machine learning giant Tibco. The combined software company will have 400,000 customers, including 98% of the Fortune 500, according to Citrix.
Known for its virtual applications and virtual desktop technology, Citrix played a key role during the pandemic in helping many enterprise organizations that had no experience with operating remotely be able to access their legacy technologies from remote locations. Secure remote access has been Citrix’s specialty from the beginning.
But with the rise of cloud over the past several years, Citrix itself has been working to move in this direction, too, shifting from selling perpetual licenses to subscription SaaS services; shifting from on-premises to cloud solutions; and shifting from point products to platform services.
The move to being privately held will give Citrix the investment needed for these moves and allow the company to execute them out of the public eye, according to Andrew Hewitt, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
“Citrix is really trying to push people towards cloud-based subscription products,” Hewitt says. “That can be a very difficult drive for them -- for any software company, really -- to make.”
Hewitt notes that the private equity firms partnering to acquire Citrix have had experience helping its portfolio companies make similar transitions.
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