Citrix Systems



Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTXS) is an American multinational corporation with a focus on software and services specialized in virtualization and remote access software for delivering applications over a network and the Internet. Citrix is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the South Florida metropolitan area, and has subsidiary operations in California and Massachusetts, and additional development centers in Australia, India and the United Kingdom.

History
Citrix was founded in 1989 by former IBM developer Ed Iacobucci in Richardson, Texas with $3 million in funding. Iacobucci quickly moved the company to Coral Springs, Florida since he lived there when he had worked at IBM.

Citrix was originally named Citrus but changed its name after an existing company claimed trademark rights. The Citrix name is a portmanteau of Citrus and UNIX.

Many of the original founding members had participated in the IBM OS/2 project. Iacobucci's vision was to build OS/2 with multi-user support. IBM was not interested in this idea so Iacobucci left. Iacobucci was offered a job at Microsoft as chief technical officer of its networking group but turned it down to start his own company.

The company's first product was Citrix MULTIUSER, which was based on OS/2. Citrix licensed the OS/2 source code from Microsoft, bypassing IBM. Citrix hoped to capture part of the UNIX market by making it easy to deploy text-based OS/2 applications. The product failed to find a market. This was due in part to Microsoft declaring in 1991 that they were not going to support OS/2 anymore.

Roger Roberts was appointed the CEO of Citrix in 1990. Roberts, a Texan, came from Texas Instruments.

From 1989 to 1995, the company did not turn a profit. In 1989 and 1990 there was no income at all.

Between 1991 and 1993, Citrix received funding from both Intel and Microsoft as well as venture capitalists. Without the help of this funding, Citrix would not have survived.

In 1993, Citrix introduced WinView, which provided remote access to DOS and Windows 3.1 applications on a multi-user platform. It became Citrix's first successful product. In 1995, WinFrame, based on Windows NT 3.5, was released. WinFrame was sanctioned by Microsoft and embraced by the enterprise businesses. WinFrame pushed Citrix into having widespread adoption.

As part of these successes, the company went public in December 1995.

Microsoft relationship
Citrix obtained a source code license to Microsoft's Windows NT 3.51. In 1995, they shipped a multiuser version of Windows NT with remote access, known as WinFrame. This product gained widespread acceptance, and enabled the company to become more profitable.

During the development of WinFrame for Windows NT 4, Microsoft decided that it did not want to license Windows NT 4 source code to Citrix. Not only that, Microsoft threatened to build its own version. Citrix and Microsoft entered negotiations about how best to solve this dilemma. After negotiations, Microsoft agreed to license Citrix technology for Windows NT Server 4.0, resulting in Windows Terminal Server Edition. Citrix agreed not to ship a competing product but retained the right to sell an extension to Microsoft's products, initially under the name MetaFrame. This relationship continued into the Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 eras, with Citrix offering Metaframe XP and Presentation Server. On February 11, 2008, Citrix changed the name of its Presentation Server product line to XenApp.

The core technology that Microsoft did not buy was the ICA protocol. Microsoft derived the work for RDP (T.share) protocol from NetMeeting which was originally derived from a deal with PictureTel (now known as Polycom).

Acquisitions

 * In September 1997, Citrix acquired DataPac for $5 million
 * In January 1998, Citrix purchased the NTrigue product from Insignia
 * In June 1998, Citrix acquired APM
 * In July 1998, Citrix acquired VDOnet for $8 million
 * In July 1999, Citrix acquired ViewSoft for $32 million
 * In February 2000, Citrix acquired Innovex Group for $48.7 million
 * In March 2001, Citrix acquired Sequoia Software Corporation, a Columbia, MD, maker of XML-based portal software.
 * In December 2003, Citrix bought Expertcity of Santa Barbara, CA, developer of the Web-hosted portable desktop product GoToMyPC and online meeting platform GoToMeeting. Expertcity became Citrix's Citrix Online division.
 * In November 2004, Citrix bought a San Jose, CA, company, Net6.
 * In June 2005, Citrix acquired Netscaler, a Santa Clara, CA, manufacturer of network appliances.
 * In November 2005 Citrix bought Teros, a Sunnyvale, CA, producer of web application firewalls.
 * In May 2006, Citrix acquired Reflectent.
 * On August 7 2006 Citrix bought San Mateo, CA, based Orbital Data.
 * In December 2006, Citrix announced an agreement to buy Ardence Inc.
 * In February 2007, Citrix acquired Aurema, developer of a CPU and memory management product.
 * In September, 2007, Citrix acquired QuickTree, a privately-held XML and Web Services Firewall company.
 * In October 2007, Citrix acquired XenSource, developer of the virtualization product XenServer that is based on the open source Xen Hypervisor.
 * In May 2008, Citrix acquired the sepagoProfile product from sepago.

Current products

 * Citrix XenApp (Application Delivery - formerly Citrix Presentation Server)
 * Citrix XenDesktop (Desktop Virtualization, VDI)
 * XenServer (Server Virtualization)
 * NetScaler (Application Optimization, Application Delivery Networking, Load Balancing, Web Application Acceleration, Application Firewall)
 * Workflow Studio (Orchestrates communications between products, IT process automation)
 * Access Gateway Standard, Advanced, Enterprise Edition (Application Access Security, SSL VPN)
 * Advanced Access Control (Either Stand Alone or built into Access Gateway Enterprise Edition with Smart Access Policies)
 * Password Manager (Application Security, Single Sign-on)
 * EdgeSight (Application Performance Monitoring)
 * Branch Repeater (formerly WANScaler; Optimizes Application Delivery to Branch Office Users, WAN optimization)
 * Provisioning Server (Delivers Application Workloads to Physical and Virtual Servers)
 * EasyCall (Integrates voice and click-to-call into any application)
 * GoToMeeting
 * GoToWebinar
 * GoToAssist
 * GoToMyPC
 * XenApp Fundamentals

Discontinued products

 * WinFrame
 * MultiWin
 * Citrix MULTIUSER (Based on OS/2 1.x)
 * Citrix WinView (Based on OS/2 2.x)
 * Citrix VideoFrame
 * Citrix NFuse Elite 1.0
 * Citrix Extranet
 * Citrix XPS Portal 3.5.1
 * Citrix MetaFrame Secure Access Manager
 * Citrix MetaFrame XP
 * Application Firewall (Web Application Security, merged into NetScaler)