Mike & Thread,
Regarding the November expiration, there's a couple of things I'd like to bring up. Currently the only objective evidence we have of the quality of Ctxs's relationship with Msft, is Msft's investment in ctxs(I believe it is a 12% stake?), the marketing agreement, winframe license, and that whole "cooperation in developing Msft's software", which involves ctxs having offices in Redmond.
...provides that CTXS license certain multi-user, NT
Terminal Server software enhancements to
Microsoft, and the companies cooperate in
developing future versions of this software.
When this agreement expires I'm concerned that the quality of the relationship could be brought more into question. After the expiration, if no further actions are taken to support the relationship, this could be legitimately viewed as a weakening in the relationship, in part because we will simply have fewer things that atest to its strength. Will ctxs maintain an office in Redmond to work with msft? If so what will they get in return? If I'm understanding this correctly, the following reference (from Hectorite's post 6918)
"In May 1997, CTXS and Microsoft entered into a
$175 million agreement (amended in April 1998) that
provides that CTXS license certain multi-user, NT
Terminal Server software enhancements to
Microsoft, and the companies cooperate in
developing future versions of this software. The
agreement calls for both companies to promote the
use of Windows NT Server-based multi-user
software and CTXS's ICA protocol until at least
November 1999, and entitles CTXS to license its
WinFrame technology based on Windows NT 3.51
until at least September 2001."
indicates as part of the deal, simply put, an exchange of software development by ctxs, for promotion of ctxs product by msft. After the agreement expires, if ctxs maintains the office space and continued co-development of the software while receiving nothing further in return, then ctxs's position could be weakened as well as the relationship. If ctxs were to pull out of Redmond, then that surely could be viewed as negatively impacting on the relationship.
Something else, please feel free to comment on!
For the past month or so I've been trying to gauge this relationship going forward. It's a very difficult thing to do without quality objective information coming from the two company's. From what I've seen however, I think you could speculate that for now, it could very well be in msft's best interest to maintain a strong relationship with ctxs. But longer term more weary. Here's my reasoning.
1. Short term, Msft's RDP is still way behind ICA. You could say they need ctxs for the development help. Long term, for how much longer and how much more can ctxs give away to msft without seriously impacting the need for thier product?
2a. As we have seen and discussed, Many of the other big boys, ie Oracle and Sun, are developing their own thin client solutions. On it's own, I contend, msft would be far behind them in the thin client push, without ctxs.
2b. If msft by itself is way behind as I said above? Ctxs solution is currently the best available, so why should msft look elsewhere.
3. The distinct possibility of ICA becoming both the thin client and asp standard. To quote from Ray's reference moneycentral.msn.com,
What I'm particularly excited about is a new area that Citrix has gotten themselves into: the application service providers, or ASPs. These guys are chairing a consortium of industry leaders that include people from Sun Microsystems (SUNW), IBM (IBM) and Dell (DELL) to really address ASPs
This IMHO could be good reason for ctxs and msft to maintain a strong relationship. But then again, msft being the Fat Brained Bubba that it is, could simply decide to go the stomping rout instead.
-David P. |
