Citrix to buy XenSource for $500 million; open-source company valuations skyrocketing (UPDATED)

Wow. The ink was barely dry on my critique of Tim O'Reilly's position on whether proprietary companies will buy up the open-source companies, and along comes the news that Citrix is buying XenSource. It's a good technology fit, but Citrix would have been one of the last companies I would have accused of a predilection for open source.

Mea ignoranta.

The news is pretty intriguing, and funny on at least one count:

This acquisition moves Citrix into adjacent server and desktop virtualization markets, expected by Citrix to grow to nearly $5 billion over the next four years. The combination of Citrix and XenSource brings together significant customer, technical, channel and go-to-market synergies. This will allow Citrix to extend its leadership in the broader Application Delivery Infrastructure market by adding key enabling technologies that make the end-to-end computing environment far more flexible, dynamic and responsive to business change. The acquisition will also strengthen each company?s strong partnership with Microsoft and commitment to the Windows platform.

A few things:

1. $500 million is a hefty premium given XenSource's revenues, which were still pretty modest (less than $10 million in 2007 and almost $0 in 2006). Citrix, in other words, paid a massive premium (50-500X (!!!)) for the brand and position that XenSource presumably has with the Xen hypervisor. It's buying big on a big future for Xen, for open source. Given the premium also paid for JBoss, this should be heartening to open-source companies everywhere. (Indeed, I feel heartened. :-)


2. VMware may actually get a run for its money now. Citrix is no slouch in this game. The combination of XenSource (server) and Citrix (desktop + channel) is impressive.


3. Citrix is falling all over itself to maintain its friendship with Microsoft. I know from experience with other companies that I've advised (which had relationships with Citrix) that Citrix loves (in a passionate, bit more than friends sort of way) Microsoft. It's therefore quite funny to see the company tripping over itself to declare its undying allegiance to Microsoft in the first paragraph. Get over it, Citrix. Be your own company and stop slobbering over Redmond. It's fine to partner closely with Microsoft, but you don't need to become ridiculous over it.

Net net: this is a big win for open source, but mostly because it pegs the value of an open source company quite high. We're on a nice trajectory here: Sleepycat's multiple was ~5x. JBoss' was a little over 10x. XenSource is close to 500x (or as much as little as 50x). We're on the right track. :-)

There are a range of open-source companies doing north of $10 million in sales in 2007 - some, quite a bit more. Using the stratospheric XenSource valuation as an example, that means there are several companies (as many as 10, by my count) worth between $500 million and $1 billion. $10 million goes a lot farther than it used to....

For other commentary, see:

• Matthew Aslett (CBR) talks about the Microsoft emphasis to XenSource's future plans.


• Gordon Haff of Illuminata discusses the ramifications of virtualization's hot streak on the acquisition.


• Nick Carr points to the acquisition as evidence of an IT sea-change.

[walter_v]

Citrix: me too!

not totally on-point with regards to the proprietary-buying-open-source topic, but wow, Citrix, have you not noticed that XenSource has flipped through 4 different strategies, models, and not to mentions more than one major set of management in the last couple of years?
Two years ago we were all so excited about Xen, and the mostly-related company XenSource.
But they've distanced themselves more and more from the Xen project, recently claimed they weren't even trying to compete with VMware, changed their product offerings around constantly... The last time I checked, I couldn't even figure out what I could buy from them.
Citrix doing this the day after the VMware IPO just looks like a big, "me too!"
Rather than making Citrix look like a virtualization player, it makes them look extremely lost.