Citrix announces 50% YoY revenue growth from cloud partners, Workspace Services

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1 Citrix announces 50% YoY revenue growth from cloud partners, Workspace Services Analyst: Scott Ottaway Michael Coté 5 Jun, 2014 At Synergy, Citrix announced 50% YoY revenue growth via Citrix Service Providers, primarily driven by partners delivering workspace as a service (WaaS). Additionally, it emphasized new technologies designed with the needs of service providers in mind, a new cloud-based platform to make it easier to deploy and manage applications, desktops and data on any device, and key success factors for service providers in the desktop/waas market. The 451 Take Citrix reported impressive double-digit revenue growth and total licenses from its cloud service provider channel. Citrix also launched multiple new technologies XenApp, XenMobile, ShareFile as well as announced a cloud-managed Workspace Services option that service providers or enterprises can leverage to optimize, automate and more easily manage WaaS infrastructure and users while still maintaining the end-user relationship. Unlike VMware, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, Citrix will not directly compete with its WaaS service provider channel by offering end-to-end WaaS. While the WaaS market continues to grow rapidly and Citrix continues to offer multiple new technologies and services, service providers need to carefully evaluate the margin opportunity and operational costs versus end-user demand and willingness to pay for the new technologies such as mobile-optimized applications and cloud storage. With the entrance of global cloud providers into the WaaS market within the last six months and the potential for commodification of workspace pricing over time, 451 Research believes that service providers Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 need to carefully evaluate the market and margin opportunity of new expanded WaaS capabilities and to not overprovision for low-opportunity use cases or to reduce margin opportunity by competing solely on price per workspace. Context Citrix is a 25-year-old software company that provides a platform for delivering of desktops, applications and data as well as virtualization, management, networking and cloud services designed to deliver anywhere access on any device to business applications and data. In 2013, Citrix had over $2.9bn in US revenue, with almost 13% YoY growth. Citrix primarily sells to enterprises and medium businesses, but over the last three years has invested heavily in its Cloud Service Provider program targeting traditional hosting companies, outsourcers, ISVs and new companies expanding their business portfolios with cloud services. Partners At Citrix Synergy 2014, Citrix unveiled detailed insight into the momentum around its Citrix Service Provider Program. CEO Mark Templeton announced that Citrix Service Providers now account for 10% of Citrix's total annual licenses. Citrix also reported 360,000 licenses delivered monthly via the Citrix subscription license and a total of 1.4 million workspaces delivered annually by service providers via perpetual license agreements. More interesting, Citrix announced 50% YoY revenue growth via Citrix Service Providers, primarily driven by partners delivering WaaS. Fifty percent revenue growth at Citrix Service Providers is particularly impressive because Citrix has over 2,500 partners in its current channel and because Citrix charges more for its workspace subscription licenses relative to competing technologies from Microsoft and VMware/Desktone. Citrix justifies this premium based on its technologies' full-fidelity end-user experience as well as service provider-specific features such as efficient network utilization, optimized application experiences on any device, multi-tenancy at the application layer and scalability to one million workspace sessions on a single infrastructure fabric. We view the Citrix revenue momentum as being driven by the three factors. First, the maturity of the workspace technologies from Citrix, especially optimization of workspaces over WANs, manageability at scale, support for multi-tenant environments and application stores and end-user self-service. Second, the increasing acceptance of WaaS by enterprises and MBs that recognize the value of hosted workspaces to solve specific 'business-ready' requirements related to mobile Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 workers, BYOD or desktops/device management. Finally, Citrix has invested heavily in the sales and marketing enablement for service providers in order to drive more effective customer acquisition by its partner ecosystem. In March, Microsoft announced similar double-digit growth of WaaS by its SPLA partner channel and that Microsoft partners deliver 2.3 million hosted workspaces each month. We believe these data points indicate that WaaS is one of the fastest-growing services opportunities for cloud and hosting providers. Strategic vision and business drivers Citrix emphasized three key success factors for service providers in the WaaS market. It is not enough to simply offer a generic desktop with no apps or just productivity applications such as Microsoft Office or Citrix Worx Mobile Apps. Citrix emphasized that the most critical success factor for service providers is to focus on line-of-business applications and not to simply deliver desktops with , Web browsing and productivity applications. A second success factor is having a focus on specific verticals. For example, Systems Solution (SSI) is a Pennsylvania-based Citrix partner that offers white-label workspaces for VAR/MSPs focused on the legal industry. One of SSI's key offers is workspaces and applications optimized for e-discovery, which makes it easier for SSI to target its sales and marketing efforts as well as optimize its workspace platform and offers. SSI leverages a platform fully based on an implementation of Citrix CloudStack, XenApp 7.5 and Receiver and leverages this platform to meet the data sovereignty requirements of the legal industry. Other key verticals cited by Citrix include health/medical industry and human resources. According to Citrix, another critical factor for WaaS providers is the delivery of high-quality end-user experiences on any device. This is a premium capability that will differentiate service providers due to the proliferation of multiple device platforms and demands from business users to work anywhere, on any device. Whether on an ipad, Android phone, tablet or a desktop, Citrix underscored that ensuring quality end-user experience on any device has traditionally been difficult to deliver and the lack of consistent end-user experience across devices negatively affects employee productivity. Citrix demonstrated a number of features in XenApp 7.5 and XenMobile to ensure that applications work well on any device and that application state and data seamlessly move across device with as little lag time as possible, whether via session-based workspaces, full VDI desktops or natively installed mobile apps with XenMobile. These success factors cited by Citrix are hard to disagree with, given the rapid growth of its CSP program and revenue and we believe that offer differentiation will be increasingly critical for service providers offering WaaS. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Products In Q1, Citrix released much-needed enhancements to XenApp with the belief that it will increase adoption of its workspace virtualization platform, especially among service providers. At Synergy, Citrix introduced new features in ShareFile, XenMobile and Workspace Services. ShareFile allows a centrally managed and orchestrated storage service that enables data to be made available on any device and to seamlessly move across devices. With Workspace Services, a service provider can leverage its own storage infrastructure, Citrix storage infrastructure or even a third-party service provider such as Windows Azure or Amazon Web Services. XenMobile addresses application and data virtualization on phone and tablet devices as well as the ability to centrally secure and manage native phone and other non-pc devices. While XenMobile capabilities are impressive and native phone applications address the consumerization of IT, XenApp 7.5 and Citrix Receiver enable service providers to deliver virtualized workspaces with existing apps that employees already know and use. Our view is that it is too early to say that there is significant market and margin opportunity for service providers leveraging XenMobile, in addition to their existing XenApp-based workspaces. Service providers need to carefully evaluate the operational and licensing costs and market demand for native mobile applications versus session-based workspaces. There may be customer use cases where native mobile applications for a specific device such as a custom factory device or locked-down ipads where XenMobile will have an advantage over a full workspace via XenApp. In summary, while Citrix's technologies appear well integrated and credible as industry leading workspaces, service providers need to carefully evaluate the margin opportunity and operational costs for these new technologies versus end-user demand and willingness to pay for the new technologies such as mobile-optimized applications. Citrix Workspace Services was the marquee announcement for cloud service providers at Synergy during the Day 1 keynote. Workspace Services provides application, user and data orchestration to make it easier for service providers to build, deploy, manage and more frequently update hosted application and workspace services. Citrix runs and manages this SaaS service, which provides an orchestration, automation and management layer for delivering workspaces. The Workspace Service engine runs on Windows Azure and provides the application and data management layer for workspaces. The back-end infrastructure for a workspace fabric can be located in a service provider's datacenter, in another providers' datacenter such as BT, AWS, SoftLayer or Azure or in a customer's on-premises private cloud. Workspace Services' availability Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 will be later this year and Citrix did not announce pricing, licensing requirements or technical capabilities so it is premature from a business and technical perspective whether Workspace Services is a valuable addition to a WaaS service provider. Assuming reasonable technical capabilities and business terms, Workspace Services will enable new service providers or smaller WaaS providers to more efficiently deliver workspaces and apps+data as Citrix will optimize the service delivery and provide the latest technology to its cloud service provider partners. For existing Citrix partners that have highly optimized their WaaS infrastructure, Workspace Services may not provide any additional significant technical capabilities. It should be noted that Citrix clearly laid out that it views Workspace Services as a key enabler for its partners and enterprises and that it has no desire to offer an end-to-end WaaS cloud service directly to end customers. Citrix CSP partners still will own the relationship with the end user and manage the infrastructure for delivering workspaces that is managed by the Workspace Services orchestration control plane. Thus, unlike VMware, AWS or Microsoft Azure, Citrix will not directly compete with its WaaS service provider channel by offering end-to-end WaaS. Competition A number of companies now offer platforms for service providers to deliver WaaS. Microsoft's VDI platform in Windows Server is Citrix's most significant platform competitor, but Microsoft and Citrix should be viewed as a symbiotic relationship, with Citrix targeting premium user experiences, a broader range of validated ISVs and scalability. Additionally, given that Citrix Workspaces runs on Microsoft Azure and most Citrix CSPs are also Microsoft partners, they will most likely continue to closely partner to ensure their platforms work well together. VMware via its Desktone acquisition, Dell via its Quest Software acquisition and NComputing are other vendors targeting Citrix's installed base as well new service providers. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses Citrix delivered updates to its integrated platform for service providers and enterprises enabling WaaS. Additionally, Citrix demonstrated strong momentum with its partner channel and revenue growth via cloud providers. Finally, technology partnership with AWS, SoftLayer and most importantly, Microsoft, enables Citrix to continue to provide technology leadership on- and off-premises. Citrix needs to manage channel and direct enterprise sales conflict and provide more compelling scenarios for service providers to adopt its complete portfolio of workspace, data and mobility applications beyond just XenApp. Opportunities Threats Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 Citrix can leverage its large service provider channel and its innovative technologies for cloud providers and enterprises to capture new markets for hosted workspaces and transition existing install base to subscription models as they invest in cloud-first, best execution providers. Commodification of the WaaS market and strong competition from major competitors including Microsoft, Amazon and VMware that want to democratize availability of cloud-hosted workspaces with their existing service provider channels. Copyright The 451 Group 6

7 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 7