The investment funds Elliott and Vista confirmed on January 31 the persistent rumors of acquisition of the professional software publisher Citrix. The operation, including the purchase of debts, reached 16.5 billion dollars.
An expected acquisition
Elliott, a Citrix shareholder since 2015, seems to have the long-running move in mind. In the summer of 2021, the fund had called for steps to be taken to improve the company’s market valuation. In October, Citrix CEO David Henshall, unimpressed with the idea of selling, resigned as CEO.
The cloud market in the sights of the Autorité de la concurrence
His interim replacement, Bob Calderon, chairman of the board of directors, acknowledges in a press release relayed by Reuters“ today’s announcement is the culmination of a five-month strategic review process “. Companies like Citrix attract private equity firms because they carry large debts, notes the wall street journal.
Citrix, founded in 1989, specializes in the creation of professional software for teleworking, for remote virtual desktop services. It also provides more and more cloud services, a sector that Citrix has appropriated a little too slowly according to some critics, especially during confinement.
The company has also begun a change of model by offering, rather than selling licenses of its software, subscriptions. A third of its $3.24 billion in 2021 revenue comes from subscriptions. A more regular income, well seen by investors and in particular by Elliott and Vista.
Citrix expected to merge with Tibco Software
The two funds intend to quickly merge Citrix with a company acquired by Vista in 2014 for $4.3 billion, Tibco Software. The latter specializes in data management software.
Dan Streetman, CEO of Tibco was excited about the prospects of this partnership, ” The workplace has changed forever, and businesses around the world will need real-time access to faster, smarter insights from the ever-increasing volumes of data at their disposal. “. Bob Calderoni does not say otherwise, ” Together with TIBCO, we will be able to operate at scale and provide a larger customer base with a wider range of solutions to accelerate their digital transformations and enable them to deliver the future of hybrid working. “.
The initiators of the merger hope to create one of the largest software providers with 400,000 customers, 98% of the Fortune 500, the most successful companies on the planet, 100 million users in a hundred countries. It will nevertheless be in competition with a bigger fish, VMware, recently emancipated from Dell. The operation should be completed in mid-2022.