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.

Comments

And later they will need 1000 H1B's

[Joe_Dragon]

And later they will need 1000 H1B's and say we can't find us workers.

Now Citrix can stop demo'ing GoToMeeting!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Now Citrix can stop demo'ing GoToMeeting!

[dvdungeon]

Sadly, Linux support has been something Citrix engineering has pushed for (and has had working internal demos) for years, but it's repeatedly blocked for political reasons (Citrix is in bed with MS and incredibly gutless when it comes to anything it perceives as even slightly risking that relationship). Cloud Platforms other issue is lack of engineering resources. It simply doesn't have enough dev/qa for the task at hand, and the product quality shows this.

Re:They Had Employees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget Citrix Xen, the shoddiest commercial repackaging of a freeware technology that I've ever seen. Windows-only management for a Linux based virtualization technology? What were these monkeys *thinking*?

citrix is good at doing things bad

[tresstatus]

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.