Happy 20th Anniversary to Citrix

Written by Alexander Ervik Johnsen

Friday, 17 April 2009 07:19

Today on the 17 of April 2009, Citrix is 20 years old. Now in 11 of those 20 years I have had the pleasure of working with Citrix Products. Oh my being 30 years of age my self, actually puts me at the age of 10 when Citrix was founded.
In these past 11 years what have Citrix ment to me? Well, besides giveing me lots to do, they've given me and my customer better method of doing our business. I don't know how many Citrix Metaframe,Presentation Server and XenApp installations I have done, but it's a lot... Over the past few years Citrix has really revitalized it self with acquisitions of companies that had products that fit Citrix. Need I mention Ardence and XenServer...

Let's go down memory lane

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.

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 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.

Well with so many acquisitions, what's next? I hope the next 20 years will be as fun,educative and meaningful as the last 11 years has been for me and all others that work with Citrix.