Wow. I don't even know where to start. I guess a lot depends on what you know about the products already. I won't attempt to describe (my understanding) of where MetaFrame fits into the picture unless you need me to.
The new products are really just a repackaging of the heritage product with a couple of add-ons. MetaFrame was the core product before, and it's now called Presentation Server. MetaFrame Access Suite encompasses heritage MetaFrame (now Presentation Server) and the add-ons, such as Conferencing Manager and Secure Access Manager. Plus there is the nFuse Elite portal product, which was originally released as a stand-alone portal, but has since been folded back into the MetaFrame Access Suite.
Citrix sales have held up extremely well during the tech recession. Their real claim to fame has always been lowering TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). There is every reason to expect demand for improvement in IT TCO to continue, so they are in a good place as IT professionals look for ways to leverage their investments. The revenue problems they did encounter resulted from a (poorly handled) switch from a shrink wrap distribution model to a e-licensing model. They took some serious revenue hits while the channel inventory at their VAR's sold-through.
Citrix claims over 120,000 customers (companies) worldwide, including 10% of the F100, 95% of the F500, and 95% of the European FT100. They have sold something like 18 million server seats, and claim that 50 million users log on to a Citrix server seat each day. Those are some pretty impressive numbers.
That seems like a lot of penetration, but it's only the tip if the iceberg. Over the past couple of years, Citrix has geared their internal sales team to focus almost exclusively on enterprise level (Fortune 500 type) customers, leaving the small- and mid-size customers to their extensive (several thousand) reseller channel. Their penetration of enterprise desktops is in the 7-8% range, meaning that there is considerable growth potential if they can push deployment of MetaFrame deeper into the enterprise. The efforts are bearing fruit, and the more widely deployed MetaFrame becomes, the greater the base of recurring revenues gets. They have managed to grow sales while the rest of IT and their immediate peers have been dying on the vine. Once the purse strings start to loosen, I expect there will be a lot of it directed towards Citrix. Rather than replace all of the pre-Y2K desktops, many companies will migrate towards centralized processing on Citrix servers, and use existing desktop boxes as thin clients. It's a proven concept, as evidenced by the current massive deployed base, but it can be taken much further.
Over the years, the demise of Citrix at the hands of Microsoft has been foretold over and over again, including former contributors on this thread. However, Microsoft and Citrix have had an excellent relationship, and there is absolutely zero reason to expect that to change. Every sale of a MetaFrame (for Windows) seat requires a corresponding Windows Server seat, which means license revenues to Microsoft. They profit greatly from Citrix's development and marketing efforts, and they would be stupid to damage what has proven to be a mutually beneficial relationship.
Two small, struggling competitors just merged (Tarantella and New Moon) to make one slightly larger struggling competitor. After they integrate their respective products (TTLA was mostly Unix/Linux server based, while New Moon was exclusively Windows), they will be better able to compete. However, their architectures are entirely different from each other, and they'll have their work cut out getting their act together. Meanwhile, Citrix's revenues are about 27x greater than the new Tarantella, so the threat remains relatively minor.
The bottom line is that Citrix MetaFrame is the gold standard for centralized application processing, and the trend away from distributed back to centralized processing will continue. Fundamentally, they are perfect position, which goes a long way towards justifying their premium valuation.
So much for a "quick summary", eh? :-) |
