Citrix Systems officials continue to remake the company, most recently by selling two cloud management products.
The company is selling its CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager product lines, both based on the open-source CloudStack technology the company inherited when it bought Cloud.com in 2011. Citrix is selling the business lines to Accelerite, a division of Persistent Systems that makes infrastructure software for the cloud.
The deal is expected to close during the current quarter. No financial details were released.
The move is part of the effort by Citrix officials to shed some businesses so that the company can focus on its core assets, in particular XenServer, NetScaler and Citrix Workspace Cloud.
“We at Citrix are extremely confident that Accelerite will help nurture our customers, who are heavily invested in running their public, commercial clouds on these solutions and will allow Citrix to focus on our core priorities around the secure delivery of apps and data,” Steve Wilson, vice president of core infrastructure at Citrix, wrote in a post on the company blog.
Selling the cloud management businesses is the latest move in what has been a tumultuous several months for Citrix, which has been under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management to streamline its operations, reduce costs, shed businesses and return more money to shareholders. In July, the company announced that then-President and CEO Mark Templeton was retiring, and that officials would review options for such businesses as the company’s GoTo online collaboration portfolio. Citrix also reworked its board of directors to better fit Elliott’s vision.
Bob Calderoni, Citrix’s executive chairman, also is currently serving as the company’s interim president and CEO.
The company announced in November that it will spin off its GoTo family of products, creating a separate and publicly traded company in a move that is expected to be completed in the second half of the year. Officials said it will enable Citrix and the spun-out company to better focus on their core technologies while improving Citrix’s operational efficiencies. The new company will include GoToAssist, GoToMeeting, GoToMyPC, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, Grasshopper and OpenVoice.
The spinoff of the GoTo business came two months after reports surfaced that Citrix officials were shopping the company around in hopes of selling it before being forced to shed many of its businesses. According to the reports, officials had met with buyout firms and other tech vendors. Elliott, a hedge fund firm, has established itself with a growing number of tech vendors by buying large numbers of shares in the companies and then agitating for changes.
Other companies under pressure from Elliott have included EMC, Juniper Networks and Riverbed Technology. In October, Elliott officials announced they had bought large stakes in video conferencing company Polycom and Mitel, a unified communications technology vendor, and were recommending that the two vendors merge to create a larger player in the collaboration market.
Citrix’s Wilson, in his blog post, said that through the latest deal, the company will work with Accelerite to enhance the integrations of CloudPlatform with XenServer, NetScaler and Citrix Workspace Cloud.
“Citrix cloud strategy is dedicated to supporting a range of technologies that enable customers to choose the right cloud for their needs—public, private or hybrid,” he wrote. “We will continue to work with both the OpenStack and CloudStack open source communities to ensure our products are optimized for offerings based on those projects.”
