Citrix Acquires XenSource Take 2

In my post Citrix Acquires XenSource for $500 million, I questioned whether two dissimilar corporate cultures could be integrated successfully. There are many examples of failed attempts in this department. Citrix has a few of these in its own past.

Yesterday, I had the chance to chat briefly with John Bara, XenSource's VP of Marketing, and he addressed this comment. He reminded me that the entire XenSource organization is going to become the foundation of a new division within Citrix called the "Virtualization and Management Division." This has the potential of solving the issue of different corporate cultures getting in the way. We'll just have to wait and see if Citrix's management team will allow XenSource to remain independent.

John also reminded me that XenSource had a very strong relationship with Microsoft that complements the relationship that Citrix already has. This relationship allows XenSource source code access on upcoming releases of Windows.

We didn't have a chance to discuss why Citrix paid such a large multiple of current revenues in the acquisition process and what impact, if any, that will have on XenSource pricing.

One thing is very clear to me, since Microsoft has its own virtual machine software products and its own access virtualization products, the Citrix folks who are tasked with managing the business relationship with Microsoft are in for a wild dance over the coming years.