Claims emerge that Citrix has doubled price of month-to-month partner licenses Citrix has allegedly made major changes to its partner program, and one of the consultancies briefed on the new arrangements told The Register that the when the news was delivered to a gathering of the Citrix faithful the result was "stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief." One reason for that reaction is a change to …
And there we have it. Citrix is not interested in serving its customers, it is interested in getting fixed revenue every month for life.
You're in business, Citrix. Uncertainty is what you live with.
Deal with it, or get a government job.
"Deal with it, or get a government job."
This is American corporatism run amok. We've become so bad that corporations are quite intentionally gouging customer (food, medical, and now IT)...because they can. Because it looks good to Wall Street. Because it's all about the stockholders.
Somehow only the stockholders are "shareholders" in today's MBA-trained world. Customers are disposable liabilities that get in the way of Wall Street's expectation of never-ending growth.
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It will only get worse from here.
Maybe part of the problem is that so much money now is in the hands of these "asset management companies" (Elliot spring to mind.....) and they have bough into so much with just enough to have a seat on the board, the only thing that matters is profit.
To be crystal clear on this, it is their profit, not the viability of the company they are milking. These VC & AM outfits can pretty much walk away whenever they want with impunity. It is unlikely they will make a loss.
This is no surprise - and it's straight from the Broadcom playbook.
Since Citrix was bought out by a PE, and installed ex-Broadcom Tom Krause as it's CEO, there's barely a quarter that goes by without a new hire from Broadcom being announced on the ELT.
You want to know Citrix's strategy for 2024? Just look at what Broadcom did 6-12 months ago. It's as simple as that.
According to yahoo, the Broadcom stock has almost tripled in the last year. Why worry if these moves are bad for customers, it’s a free market (right…?) so a new company can come and compete….
The issue, I think, is more that VCs are the only ones funding startups, so there is a ticking clock with which to grow, which leads to a lot of failing companies that would otherwise keep prices in check.
The companies can only gouge because there is no competition.
Broadcom have purchased a perfectly healthy mature product that they will suck the blood out of for 3-5 years. Then jettison the corpse. 99% of customers will do something else. The locked in customers are going to lose (badly)
However, at the end, Broadcom will still exist, ready for its next victim.
Citrix, seem to be doing it to themselves. After 3-5 years, the will be a footnote in IT history. Like, say, Compaq.
"The companies can only gouge because there is no competition."
Nail on head. It is the result of 40+ years of capitalism via government stimulus - huge tranches of money released periodically whenever the market sneezes.
There is no point in investing in long term - instead hold on the cash to catch the next money-release wave with a guaranteed single year return of ~50 percent.
So not a virtual desktop at all. An actual desktop. These can’t be paused, cloned etc and need time to patch (and all need patching rather than having an image). Yes, computers are useful, but accessing remotely isn’t what the “virtual” in “virtual machine” means. Try that in a company of 200 or more, try getting a temp employee one, now have different software requirements and access rights…
I know they are not "virtual" but actually "remote" desktops. I also know that they work for a 10 users org and not a 200 or 2000 users org. But they are really cheap, they work well, and for a small office they are just fine. And of course they have to be maintaned and updated and so on, but it's not such a big deal once windows update works and also the auto update on the other software (browsers and the accounting program they use) works.
Citrix, because who wouldn't want a 32GB Ryzen 7950x with a 4090RTX and 2TB PCI-E5.0 NVME to run applications slower than a 1998 Packard Bell PC with Windows NT ?
Any company STILL running anything citrix in 2024 deserves to crash and burn in the same way as anyone still using Novell Netware or a windows 3.1 server.
Hey, hey, there ... true, NLMs were potentially-crashy in Netware < v5 (no memory protection, co-operative multitasking), but Protected Address Spaces in v5.x roped the badly-written NLMs in, to the extent they couldn't stomp on other parts of the OS or other NLMs. And if vendors' NLMs weren't written to use the PAS interface, then they really shouldn't be on your Netware server(s). In other words, don't use that vendor's product if it requires non-PAS-using NLMs.
(Banyan Vines looked interesting, too, but I've no direct experience with it.)
Is that your server?
Trouble is it is a well known charactistic of remote solutions that they use the computing power of the remote server rather the local client machine. So if you purchased that 7950x system just to run Citrix/Remote Desktop, you’ve either been had or believe a Ferrari is a good choice for around town…
Tell me you know nothing about modern VDI / Citrix without telling me you know nothing about VDI/Citrix.
I've built full stock trader & video editing platforms on VDI without any issue - in fact many of the US broadcasters and some of the big movie studios use VDI for their non-linear editing environments. Citrix / VMWare Horizon or even HP/Teradici PCoIP. Go look at some of the AMD Epyc powered powerhouses with NVidia A-Series GPU's (A16 or A40), NVidia GRID licencing, 2Tb RAM and super fast storage - workstation as a service kinda stuff. If you're manipulating enormous 8K video files, rather than having to drag the source video files over the slow network to your PC, you can edit direct from storage on the Infiniband HDR 4x connector at wire speed of 200Gb/s in the data centre which is way faster than the 6Gb/s you get on your example ryzen's nvme drive.
Oh, and Netware was a brilliant fileserver in it's day - way way better than WIndows Server, as anyone who used the 'salvage' command or ncopy will happily tell you.
This is why it’s so risky for MSPs and the like to just all in with one solution, because when they change the goalposts you might be up a special creak with salaries to pay. These massive corps don’t want you and are quickly decided if they really even need you. Also highlights the fragility of just outsourcing everything like the provision of virtual Desktops, wouldn’t be surprised if you see a decent chunk of customers moving their stuff back in house or to physical devices again.
If memory serves; for a reason I never understood SAP is by far the worlds largest citrix reseller.
If a change like this were to hit them, we would see some really dramatic stuff.
Therefore I find it 90% likely that this move will just hit SMBs and maybe sure some enterprise customers.
Though even hitting service operators like fujitsu, atos, would very likely create waves we would see, so again; evidence so far suggests this move does not include "channel" partners with a certain status (I do not know if they have levels like gold etc) yet rather all the "smaller" players.
And my personal recommendation with deep insigfht into various citrix tools would be to please move away from them.
Once they have your balls in a vice ...
Not sure if I am ahead of the curve, but using my experience, skills and position I have pulled 4 key services back in house that had spiralled out of control.
Best one was the CX SaaS service which they wanted £3,600 a year for replaced by a FOSS alternative on one of our rented servers for c. £50/month. And that server is also running the marketing email suite that we pulled in saving £800/month.
If we could dump Adobe, life would be perfect.
Obviously we aren't using O365.
Simplify it. Avoid dependencies and subscriptions. Consider alternatives to specialist software. Are there things that you don't really need to do. Can you switch back to paper for some stuff. Yes, paper - card indexes, business cards, account books, the stuff that you could buy at WHS for a couple of quid and keep in a locked cupboard - 100% protected from East European hackers. Huge companies ran for decades with thousands of employees and never suffered a ransomware attack that way. Tech is only worth using when it is not a vulnerability or dependency and doesn't empty your bank account.
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