While everyone else was holding user and analyst fetes at Moscone in San Francisco, Citrix hauled us back to the Key Biscayne Ritz-Carlton near their Florida Mother Ship. We've gotten to know the Citrix team reasonably well since they acquired our NetScaler friends. President and CEO Mark Templeton seems to be one of those guys in the same category as John Chambers -- nice person, people like to work with him while at the same time being a relentless driver for evolution and change. XenSource is the latest Citrix acquisition and the XS team was around to talk about that even though the deal hadn't officially closed. Our earlier analysis of the acquisition hasn't really changed much -- there are no shortage of challenges after you spend $500M of your stockholders' hard-earned money on a company without any real revenues (as e-Bay's Meg Whitman seems to be painfully learning with Skype on an even bigger scale). The XenSource acquisition certainly could make good sense for Citrix and in many ways represents business challenges they can't evade. There aren't a lot of details at the blocking and tackling level yet, but the story line holds our attention.
