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Building a strong foundation for Cloud Software Group

January 11, 2023
Tom Krause

Cloud Software Group, as the combination of two great legacy companies–Citrix and TIBCO, has enormous potential and an opportunity to become one of the global leaders in delivering mission-critical enterprise software at scale. When I accepted the responsibility of becoming CEO of this new venture, I knew there would be difficult decisions to make. To get to where I know this company can go requires us to completely rethink how we operate and organize at every level of the business and rebuild our go-forward plans looking to the future instead of the past.

I know there are many in the industry anxious to understand what we are doing as the Cloud Software Group. And in light of the significant changes that we made yesterday, I am taking to this public forum to share more about Cloud Software Group.

Cloud Software Group is the holding company formed as a result of the Citrix take-private transaction and related business combination with TIBCO. Citrix and TIBCO, as well as many of the other brands that existed within those two companies—such as NetScaler, ShareFile, XenServer, Jaspersoft and others—will operate as business units, retaining their own brands and continuing to deliver their core products.

Over the past three months, my executive leadership team and I have conducted a rigorous planning process. In that planning, we examined every role, tool, system, and process across the entire company. We thoroughly reviewed our product portfolio, the competitive environment, customer needs, go-to-market motions, marketing strategies, engineering, support capabilities and general and administrative functions.

We have built a plan to create value. Our intent is to invest more in our core products and support to deliver greater value to our customers. We also built a plan to create greater financial value to allow us to invest in other mission-critical technologies to take to market. And we’ve built a plan that will financially reward all of those that are part of Cloud Software Group going forward—employees, partners and investors.

While there are significant impacts to the organization, many that have been painful for the teams this week, I am confident in our new business model.

Yesterday, we notified roughly 15% of the total Cloud Software Group workforce that their roles have been eliminated or made redundant as part of our planning process for the new company. In general, these impacts are aligned to:

• Eliminating role redundancies in corporate functions and shared services as we operate as a combined business, flattening our organizational structure dramatically to drive far greater accountability.
• Focusing more of our internal resources on our top customers and the product roadmaps that align to those customers.
• Investing more heavily in product development within our refined product roadmaps, and eliminating resources dedicated to other non-essential areas.
• Investing more in support to improve customer satisfaction.
• Simplifying our internal processes, programs, and systems and the management and administration roles needed to support them.

While building our plan required the difficult decisions that resulted in the elimination of many roles, we now know where we are investing in the next year, what we need to accomplish in each area of the business, and what we should be focused on as a team.

As a result of this discipline, we will have better predictability in our business results, with more realistic plans and targets that keep the business on track.

To the individuals who were impacted, I want to personally thank you for your contributions to Citrix and TIBCO. Please know that these decisions were not taken lightly. Rather, they were practical business decisions designed to strengthen the combined companies. As a leader, these are the toughest types of decisions to make. But our actions yesterday set us up for growth in the future.

We have established a foundation from which we can build a tremendous amount of value for our customers, giving us the cash flow to invest in our products, technology, and the future acquisitions that will put Cloud Software Group on a path to becoming one of the largest software companies in the world.