If you thought the leaked internal VMWare memo criticizing the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix was bad, get a load of this: Mike DiPetrillo, Specialist System Engineer of Industry Research and Competitive Analysis at VMWare (VMW) and one of VMWare’s bloggers, posted a rather critical blog post on his personal space yesterday attacking Citrix’ acquisition of Xensource.
Other than calling Xensource a ‘good little company’, DiPetrillo says he’s still trying to figure out why Citrix paid $ 500 million for it in the first place.
“In Q3 XenSource announced 1,000 customers. On the call they said they added another 400 customers. Good growth! That puts the total at 1,400 customers. Then came the partner count – 1,817 partners certified to sell XenSource. Hmmm. So now we have 1,817 partners trying to get business from the 1,400 customers that total $2 million in revenue (that’s $1,100 in revenue per partner). Good days to be a Citrix partner.”
He goes on to say:
“OK. So the strategy is go and spend $500 million on a company that’s losing money, switch all of your current successful products and branding over to the losing company, and then exit the market when your larger partner moves into the market. Is this the end of Citrix then? Terminal Services in Windows Server 2008 closes the gap pretty nicely. Virtual Desktops are also taking large chunks of market share. Time will tell where Citrix ends up.”
In the end, it’s fair critiscm and DiPetrillo does raise some good points, but coming from a VMWare employee (although published on his personal blog), the article is bound to make some people frown.
[Via Channel Marker]
Technorati Tags: virtualization, virtualisation, xensource, citrix, vmware, competition, criticism, Mike DiPetrillo
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