Citrix, Tibco Layoffs: 5 Things To Know

A person familiar with the situation tells CRN that cutting 15 percent of Citrix and Tibco’s workforce, which is what Cloud Software Group CEO Tom Krause has noted as the percentage of employees being laid off, comes to about 2,000 jobs.

Four months after the close of Citrix and Tibco’s $16.5 billion merger into Cloud Software Group—and amid high inflation, rising interest rates and concern of a possible global recession—the cloud and enterprise application vendor became the latest tech company to lay off employees.

CSG CEO Tom Krause said in an online post Wednesday that CSG cut about 15 percent of its workforce in an effort to make a more streamlined company with cash to invest in products, technology and acquisitions in an increasingly competitive cloud market. He also posted some of the statement to his LinkedIn account.

Sources close to the situation told CRN that 15 percent of CSG’s employees means about 2,000 jobs were cut. The roles range from commercial sales to channel software engineers.

“It’s a sad day for a company that pioneered the VDI [virtual desktop infrastructure] market,” one source told CRN. “It’s a terrible day, with a lot of good Citrix employees with families and kids leaving the company. This is brutal.”

CRN has reached out to CSG for comment.

The tech industry as a whole has been hit by a wave of cutbacks .

Salesforce, Cisco, HP Inc., Intel, Elastic, Aqua Security, AvePoint and N-able are some of the vendors to announce cuts recently.

Here’s what you need to know about Citrix and Tibco’s job cuts.

CSG CEO Tom Krause

15 Percent Of CSG Cut

Krause said that CSG cut about 15 percent of its workforce in an effort to make a more streamlined company with cash to invest in products, technology and acquisitions in an increasingly competitive cloud market.

In an online post Wednesday, Krause said that CSG cut redundant corporate roles at Citrix and Tibco and will invest more in “customer satisfaction” and product development—eliminating resources for “other nonessential areas.”

A person familiar with the situation told CRN that cutting 15 percent of Citrix and Tibco comes to about 2,000 jobs cut. The person called the layoffs the “largest Citrix has ever had.”

The source said that Krause—hired from Broadcom amid its bid to acquire VMware—sent an email Friday about layoffs happening Tuesday.

The source received an email from human resources Tuesday morning about getting laid off, with webinars all morning in shifts to explain next steps, the source said.

Channel Sales Engineers Affected

The layoffs include much of Citrix’s commercial sales organization as well as some channel-facing employees, sources said.

Citrix employees who took to LinkedIn to say they were laid off from the company included a networking, application delivery and security specialist for Florida and Georgia commercial field sales; a senior sales engineering manager who’d worked at Citrix for about 15 years; a software engineer; and an enterprise application delivery and security specialist, among others.

Employees of other vendors took to LinkedIn to post about job openings those affected by CSG’s layoffs could pursue, including IGEL, Aisera and Seesy.

In his online statement, Krause said that CSG sought to simplify its internal processes, programs, systems, management and administration roles and conducted a three-month review process before Tuesday’s layoffs.

Remaining employees will focus more on top customers and product road maps aligned to those customers. The changes ready CSG for more predictable business results and “more realistic plans and targets that keep the business on track,” Krause said.

More Accounts To The Channel

The layoffs come as CSG moves to focus directly on its top 1,000 enterprise accounts, leaving midtier and commercial accounts to be supported and serviced by solution providers, sources familiar with the situation told CRN.

“This [strategic shift] could be a really good thing for the channel,” said another source. “With Citrix focusing on the top 1,000 accounts, that leaves the channel with the opportunity to service the remaining accounts. This could provide some explosive growth for Citrix service providers.”

That said, it is going to take some time for the aftershocks of the layoffs to wear off within the partner and customer community, the source said.

“When there is this big a shakeup, it takes a while for things to shake out,” said the source. “But anytime you have this much change and transformation, there is an opportunity for the channel to make money.”

Layoffs Come After Acquisition

The changes come four months after the acquisition of Citrix in September for $16.5 billion. Investment firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital—an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management—took Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Citrix private, merged it with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco and created a new parent organization, CSG.

In November 2021—two months before Vista and Evergreen unveiled their acquisition plans, Citrix had said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that its board had approved a restructuring plan that included “the elimination of full-time positions,” with $65 million to $90 million earmarked for employee severance agreements. It’s unclear if Tuesday’s layoffs stem from that pre-acquisition plan.

The source said that the Citrix acquisition and the planned acquisition of VMware by chipmaker Broadcom represent “a major bellwether change” in the VDI market.

The virtual desktop industry has gotten more competitive for Citrix and VMware as cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have rolled out similar services and turned to third-party vendors to keep users within the hyperscalers’ environments.

Ethan Fitzsimons

Upcoming Channel Program Changes

Earlier this month, Citrix named Ethan Fitzsimons its new channel chief and promised a “more predictable” and “more profitable” partner program, set to launch March 6 for Citrix partners. Tibco partners will not be affected by those changes.

“It’s about how do we allow [partners] to do their job faster, easier, simpler,” Fitzsimons told CRN. “How can we be simpler to work with? More predictable. More profitable. And really remove any of the inhibitors—in most cases, artificial inhibitors—that were slowing down the pace of business that we could do with our partners. … We allowed ourselves to become a little bit too complex when it came to our partner program. … That’s feedback that I received from our partners consistently.”

Mike Strohl, CEO of Concord, Calif.-based Citrix partner E360—No. 111 on CRN’s 2022 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in an interview that some CSG people he has worked with have been impacted.

Nevertheless, Strohl said that he is still confident in Citrix’s channel leadership, including Fitzsimons, Hector Lima, CSG’s executive vice president of field and channel sales, and Mike Fouts, CSG’s vice president of global service providers.

“The core DNA of what makes Citrix Citrix lives within those guys,” he said. “I fully believe in what they’re doing.”

Strohl said he is happy with the upcoming partner program changes he has heard about from Citrix.

“We’re most excited about the Citrix [Service Provider] program [changes] and what we can bring to market collectively with our customers,” he said. “There’s actually been a lot of work done on Citrix’s part to make that a much better and more-aligned go-to-market” motion.