<aside> 💡 Before I begin, I want to clarify that I did not embark on this journey alone at Citrix. I had the help of a seasoned engineering manager Xiaofeng Zhu. I had a sharp Product Marketing Manager in Carisa Stringer on our side. Most of all, my supportive manager: Harsh Gupta, took a bet on a new Product Manager eager to learn willing to take on complex challenges. A product manager is nothing without their colleagues.
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Humble beginnings
Founded by former IBM engineer and principal OS/2 designer Ed Iacobucci, Citrix traces its roots from the early days of the computing industry. At the time, as companies transitioned to using microcomputers- there was a limitation to OS/2 that couldn't support multiple users on the same system.
Citrix's main product was a multi-user extension of OS/2, offering an additional go-to-market for Microsoft, opening a new customer base that helped them gather adoption from large corporates. With Citrix Multiuser, users could connect and simultaneously run character cell-based applications from remote terminals. Beyond the eventual IBM/Microsoft split, Citrix would extend MS-DOS and Windows NT-based systems. As enterprise computing moved beyond the mainframe era- advancements in hardware operating systems gave way to a technology that allowed companies to take better advantage of the hardware they owned: Virtualization.
In the computing space, Virtualization is a method of dividing the resources of computer hardware. Initially intended as a term dividing the resources that mainframe computers had, the word primarily references software-implemented computing environments. Platform virtualization is where administrators can deploy a virtual machine on a host computer with the full functionality of a physical machine. Admins adopt Virtualization to benefit from saving money on physical computers by having multiple VMs provisioned on a single server; it provides failover if those machines lose state and potential emulation support.
With a slew of acquisitions made in networking, business operations software, and software virtualization- Citrix's products evolved from mere extensions of Microsoft's Operating Systems to a suite of tools that IT admins use to provision and deploy virtual machines. In addition to its flagship virtualization product suite, Citrix also provides solutions for mobile device management, project management, and networking.
To better understand Citrix's virtualization portfolio, admins have three major concerns that need to be solved. Access and control, or rather, how employees need to authenticate and be authorized to use resources within a company. Provisioning and deployment, how resources are provisioned and managed. Monitoring and maintenance, how admins maintain their working environment for end-users, and ensuring uptime.
Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is the main product that handles the corporate admin's needs. It has several features and products within the suite. Monitoring and issues are handled in an application called Director, the configuration in Studio. Depending on the admin's end goal- they can configure several products in the suite, such as Machine Creation Services that provision machines on behalf of the user. Traditionally, these bits need to be deployed on an on-premises infrastructure.
A locally installed version of Citrix Studio
30+ years from Citrix's founding, the enterprise market shifted from on-premises, self-hosted infrastructure- to a cloud environment pioneered by AWS's Andy Jassy, Azure's Satya Nadella, and Salesforce's Marc Benioff. After a successful activist stake made by Eliott Management's Jesse Cohn, the company sold off its GoToMeeting properties to refocus the business in line with its core competency, IT Ops.
In 2017, after a slew of re-organizations and cost-cutting efforts- the virtualization product found itself at a crossroads. At the time, IT organizations found themselves in an adoption trap. Cloud vendors increasingly prioritized their subscription-based tooling yet still had to maintain 100s of locally installed applications and infrastructure for their users. In addition, VMWare and new entrants in the virtualization space were also going after a lucrative market where customers traditionally have low churn. Companies that adopted virtualization technologies handled 7-year upgrade cycles, and as such, they are a source of stable revenue for companies looking to increase their ticket size increase. As a result, Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops were on the verge of losing relevance. Perceived as a legacy offering in the face of Amazon Workspaces and VMWare Workspace One: inaction meant that you were on a declining install base as more companies considered alternatives to on-premises managed infrastructure.
In parallel, the FOSS and open-core business models transformed the developer's skillset from proprietary skills to transferrable skills. The same was about to happen with IT Admins. Traditionally- CVAD requires specialized training to use and deploy the software stack. There is significant pain to provision those pieces, and customers responded positively to the prospect of not having to manage those pieces.
After some evaluation, the product team decided to move with a cloud-hosted version of its software called Virtual Apps and Desktops Service that entered GA in 2017. At the time, the team would host an on-premises version of the 'control plane' on behalf of the customer, enabling service integrators and large customers to focus on onboarding their resources without worrying about upgrading and maintaining the product itself. This hybrid approach would, in theory, give customers the flexibility to migrate to the cloud on their terms.