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Citrix Spinning Off GoTo Collaboration Business, Laying Off 1,000 People (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: In addition to the decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company, the initial results of Citrix's operations review, also involves a 'realignment of resources' that is expected to eliminate about 1,000 full-time and contract roles, over and above the effect of spinning off the GoTo business. Most of the layoffs and refocusing of resources are expected in November and in January 2016.
And later they will need 1000 H1B's and say we can't find us workers.
Everybody loves getting to spend extra time with the family during the Christmas holidays. And January is always a great time to start looking for a new job.
Any bets on what percentage of their yearly salary the top ten executives at Citrix will get for coming up with this idea of 'realignment of resources'? Over or under 100%?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Why is there a comma after review?
At the bottom of the
one different release version of the GoToMeeting app per week per person, it's probably not a significant loss. I can do with as few as, say, 52 different instances of the same app on my machine. I don't need 152, or 1,052.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I thought they mostly made a living by conning clueless CIOs into buying their OS/2-Era dumb-terminal technology and selling some shoddy VOIP product that one of their interns coded up in between coffee runs. Seems like the only time I hear "We're moving to Citrix," the company is well past coughing up blood and is about to be acquired by VCs and be gutted for its intellectual property.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
of one of those corporations.
I like how you assume that because a female candidate left with a smile on her face, they probably asked her easy questions, cuz, you know, chick.
Super-classy.
Sounds to me like you got your answer, your parents did waste their money on a CS degree.
It seems like Citrix was frequently attempting to upsell anyone that would listen on how GoToMeeting was the solution to every problem. Instead, it completely derailed an evaluation Citrix CloudPlatform.
We had asked for a cloud control panel and hypervisor system based around Linux and Citrix assured us they had strong experience in that area. What I found was that the Citrix CloudPlatform product seemed half-baked where even stepping through the quick-start setup guide resulted in a log full of java null pointer exceptions and didn't function correctly for activating VMs.
Then the Senior Sales Engineer of Citrix Cloud Platform lets me know this is a great time to show how Citrix GoToMeeting could save the day! He demanded I go to a GoToMeeting invite to have them show I was only a couple clicks away from having everything I could ever want from CloudPlatform (but couldn't just tell me where in the documentation or knowledgebase I could just find those couple clicks myself). At that point I pointed out that GoToMeeting wouldn't work on my GNU/Linux desktop which resulted in a condescending reply of "we usually do this from a Windows machine (like your desktop) where you run the GTM viewer."
So, I got to re-iterate to the Senior Sales Engineer of Citrix Cloud Platform that I really do know what OS my desktop is running and it isn't Microsoft Windows. I also found out that basic GNU/Linux skills such as using SSH public/private key authentication or multi-user use of GNU Screen. So, instead we spent the rest of the week discussing how there was no plan for Citrix to port GoToMeeting to Linux. Once they finally stopped being condescending pricks pushing that Windows can be the only true desktop and that they would be willing to support Citrix Cloud Platform without having to run Windows, the evaluation had completely derailed.
In retrospect, it is really scary we even considered a company with such poor GNU/Linux skills and support for a complex cloud configuration based around GNU/Linux. But I'm glad they are now considering getting some focus.
Maybe they bought VMware desktop and found that they could reduce headcount by having fewer people manage the hardware. (Ducks.)
Actually, I'm only half-kidding here because I once saw a guy sell whitebox computers to NEC technologies (when they made and sold their own computers) and I had the wonderful experience myself of selling storage technology to EMC (when they had, well you know).
It's a dependent clause.
The "also" applies to "the decision", as opposed to "the initial results".
The sentence is quite the run-on, and it's awkwardly constructed; however, it's grammatically correct.
A less awkward construction would be:
"Citrix's operations review initially resulted in a decision to spin off the GoTo collaboration products business into a new company. In addition, it has also motivated a decision to institute a euphemistic (in the opinion of the editors of CIO.com) 'realignment of resources', which is expected to eliminate approximately 1,000 full time and contract positions in the remaining company."
Here's the actual press release from Citrix, rather than a slashdot summary of a CIO.com article:
https://www.citrix.com/news/an...
Wait. Brown? I thought you Asians were all yellow. Man, was my BA a waste?
Geek_for_Hire? So you too are unemployed with a CS degree, watching South Park crushing the Social Justice bullcrap brigade?
I use Citrix Support for XenServer and CloudPlatform. XenServer support is ok if you get escalated to someone from Florida (Tampa Bay?) who's one of their engineers, as far as CloudPlatform I had to speak with someone from Japan when I needed to speak with someone of a 'higher support tier'. Japan!?! c'mon!
Even though I made it abundantly clear at the beggining of my calls I had already followed through with the appropriate KB article and had no success, I had to be pretty pushy before they agreed to escalate my case beyond their 1st level drones.
In that scenario, wouldn't *the boss* be the one likely to be wearing the smile?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Can Citrix really make enough from freemium Xen?
Microsoft has already killed Metaframe(XenApp) or whatever Citrix is calling it this week.
vmWare is superior to Xen, in my opinion, but both Xen and vmWare face the very real threat from free/bundled HyperV.
I just can't see the logic in dumping the cash cow that is subscription based GoToM*
Is for Cows you insensitive clod!
I've worked on citrix for several years starting with 4.0 metaframe. The concept of what citrix WANTS to do is good. Every version that comes out is supposed to be better and better, yet the same old problems plague citrix, like printer issues. Every version that comes out renames the management consoles and other featuers/settings within them. To me, it appears that people are just changing things for the sake of changing them or for it to appear like something new and different is happening, but the things that they should be changing never get changed. Citrix has acquired numerous companies over the years and never really integrated them into a unified management console, so you wind up with a minimum of 3 unique consoles that aren't intertwined and sometimes don't even talk to each other. This frustrates the admins/engineers that have to work on citrix. Citrix should be working to keep these people as happy as possible, because in reality the admins and engineers are really the only cheerleaders for Citrix. Go talk to some users, ANY USERS. most of them HATE using citrix.
stephen
Yellow are the Chinese. Brown are the dot Indians
I know that SAP uses Citrix for their applications, so doesn't the company get enough from them to stay afloat? Particularly given how SAP just rakes in cash based on their certification programs alone.
There is probably too much competition in the collaboration software - WebEx, GTM and just.me
Why are they getting rid of GOTO?
One problem with Citrix is that their cash cow, XenApp, is getting less relevant. They have a huge presence in health care and other sectors where they can't assure endpoint security, have lots of shared machines/terminals, and have a lot of regulatory compliance issues. However, Microsoft keeps improving RemoteApp which can be had for the price of a CAL rather than a CAL plus Citrix seat. In addition, more applications are migrating to browser-based HTML5 type systems that don't require weird client-side plugins or settings anymore. VDI is also more useful and easier to do now, as long as your company falls into one of the favorable Windows licensing scenarios that make the price reasonable.
I've worked with Citrix since MetaFrame, learned, forgot and relearned it 3 times for various jobs. Every time I came back to it, there was yet another massive shift in the architecture, management tools and deployment model. This latest version that I'm relearning (7.6) merged the XenApp and XenDesktop management platforms into one. I imagine that's a pretty huge shift for average Citrix admins. Anyway, they keep changing things on the periphery of the platform, but the core doesn't change -- it's still a more WAN-friendly drop in replacement protocol for Remote Desktop.
Selling off the GoTo stuff is probably a good idea. It'll let them keep pumping out new XenApp/XenDesktop enhancements or improving NetScaler, which are probably more reliable sources of revenue. And here's the reality from an end user computing guy who works for big companies -- there will always be "senior applications" that are deemed business-critical and cannot be replaced for whatever reason. A new sexy startup isn't going to have these, which is why the cloud, mobile access, etc. is gaining so much traction now. But, even in the more technologically forward companies I've worked for, I've seen stuff like really horrible Access applications, Excel macros, VB 6 GUIs cobbled together by "consultants", and others that just need to keep chugging along. And anyone who says "just move to Salesforce.com" hasn't experienced the corporate politics that prevent some of that from happening.
We've moved to Citrix for a lot of our applications. It works, and is a lot better than the alternative. The applications we have moved to Citrix are ALL old legacy applications that are too expensive to replace. So it is essentially a stopgap solution to keep limping along until we can eventually phase them out. In an ideal world we wouldn't use it, in an ideal world we would have planned for and budgeted for replacements. I rarely if ever see an ideal world however.
You're right, users hate it, however they get used to it. They hate it because they have to remotely log in, and it usually takes a bit longer. That said, they would hate the eventual alternative even more, which would be constant individual problems and calls to IT. It is also more useful for outside clients to your network. Bottom line is it lets us totally control the environment, which with aging applications is essential to them not breaking all the time. Again, perfect world, at least within our own network we would have more control, but again, realistically it doesn't really happen despite best efforts. It also makes upgrades/enhancements/bug-fixes much easier to deploy to a handful of servers, than thousands of computers, also important to keeping old software up to speed enough to keep serving a useful purpose.
So Citrix, while certainly not ideal, is very useful at least in that regard.
We had a look into this but it was going to be way too expensive to make it worthwhile.