Citrix: Hmmm, profit down 30%? Right. 900 HEADS WILL ROLL Hundreds of workers at Citrix Systems are to be shown the door to counter nose-diving profit and boost the R&D pot. The purveyor of virtualisation, networking and cloud infrastructure stuff last night rolled out results for the three months ended 31 December and sales were up six per cent to $851m – analysts had forecast $844. …
Here's a company with good products, some very loyal customers and a healthy profit but it is deemed to be failing and has to lay people off and yet some never-yet-profitable, and possibly never-ever-profitable startup somewhere will be having another round of VC funding to spaff on its far less mature virtualisation product development.
Dunno. If at the end of it, their costs are lower and they're doing the same stuff with fewer bods, just with better organisation, that's gotta be a good thing for the business if not the people they fire. Right?
Better to do it when you've got the time and space to make sure things are done properly, than to be forced into some sort of 'operation firefight' on the back of continuing bad results. Been there for the latter, and the results are *always* ugly.
I can only hope this means tossing some unneeded management and fat-cat sales types out the window and not hacking away your top developers, big thinkers, or good hunters. That's not often the case, sadly. I like Citrix products myself, I've had good luck with VDI-in-a-box, XenDesktop, XenApp, and NetScaler. XenServer is what I use in my lab and it's been rock solid.
"I can only hope this means tossing some unneeded management and fat-cat sales types out the window and not hacking away your top developers"
Whilst I think that overall it is better to cut the management layers and less so the R&D, and other technical roles, I do believe that just because one is a "top developer" in a company they are not always a boon to that company. In my experience a substantial subest of said "top developers" tend to be the sociopathic "rockstar" type of developer, who piss off everyone and are just plain unpleasant to be around. Which could be counter productive. I prefer a less but suffiently qualified developer, who does not have such sociopathic traits and is friendly, helpful and (sometimes) a teamworker, above the haughty "top developer".
If the latest quarter OpEx jumped to 550m, that means about 2Bn annual OpEx, Which means that 900 heads that will save 100m annually are a significant portion of the workforce.
Why would you wait until the end of year/quarter figures to realize you have inefficiency on such large scale?
Which makes me believe it's just a purge to satisfy investors and senior management.
Which makes me believe the "delayering" will involve mainly the removal of the lowest layer personnel, leaving all of the incompetent middle and higher management intact.
The faster XenServer dies the better off the virtualization market will be.
It's no surprise that they're tanking - when you have a shitty product people stop using it.
If someone can explain to me why installing an update to Xen Tools requires 5+ reboots of the VM (and even then may leave the VM in an unbootable state requiring a rollback to snapshot) then I might be more forgiving. A service pack to our hypervisor shouldn't require multiple hours of outage for every VM running, and since it DOES we'll just take that outage and use it to migrate to VMWare instead.
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