Citrix Systems Inc's Comment on Competition and Industry Peers
We sell our products in intensely competitive markets. Some of our competitors
and potential competitors have significantly greater financial, technical, sales
and marketing and other resources than we do. As the markets for our products
and services continue to develop, additional companies, including those with
significant market presence in the computer appliances, software and networking
industries, could enter the markets in which we compete and further intensify
competition. In addition, we believe price competition could become a more significant
competitive factor in the future. As a result, we may not be able to maintain
our historic prices and margins, which could adversely affect our business,
results of operations and financial condition.
Mobile and Desktop
Our Desktop and Application Virtualization products are based on an alternative
technology platform the success of which will depend on organizations and customers
perceiving technological and operational benefits and cost savings associated
with adopting desktop and application virtualization solutions. Our primary
competition in this market is the existing IT desktop management practice of
manually configuring physical desktops, which is time-consuming, expensive and
subject to inconsistency. We also face numerous competitors that provide automation
of these processes and alternative approaches, including VMwares Horizon View
product and Oracle Corporation, or Oracles, broad virtualization stack which
is a feature of its operating system and management software. We believe XenDesktop
and XenApp give Citrix a competitive advantage by providing customers multiple
ways to virtualize and deliver desktops and or apps with one, integrated virtualization
system and delivering a higher performance user experience.
Our Enterprise Mobility Management product line, XenMobile, competes with VMware,
MobileIron, Good Technology and other smaller competitors. We believe we differentiate
ourselves from these competitors by providing the most complete solution on
the market, with MDM, MAM and core mobile applications, including secure mobile
email, calendar and browser.
We also see competition from competitors that are combining mobile and desktop
technologies. VMware is an example with their Horizon Suite, positioned as a
platform for workforce mobility. We believe the Citrix solution, enabled by
the Xen suite of products, is the best solution available today that can securely
deliver a mobile workspace - all Windows, Web, SaaS and native mobile applications,
data and virtual desktops - to any device, anywhere. Further, we believe that
our end-user experience has a competitive edge when compared to the alternative
solutions due to the intuitiveness and self-service features of our offering.
Networking and Cloud
Our NetScaler products compete against other established competitors, including,
F5 Networks, Inc., or F5, and to a lesser extent, A10 Networks. Both compete
with us for traditional enterprise sales opportunities, while F5 is our principal
competitor in the Internet-centric market segment. We continue to enhance NetScalers
feature capability and aggressively market NetScaler to our existing customer
base as well as expanding into telco and cloud provider markets.
Our ByteMobile Smart Capacity products primary competition is a network engineering
organization that elects not to employ the type of optimization solution we
offer. In addition, ByteMobile Smart Capacity competes with single-purpose or
limited-purpose vendors that address a portion of what our product offers and
may or may not partner with other vendors to complete their offerings. Our ByteMobile
Smart Capacity product is a market share leader in the video and web optimization
market, with a large installed base of tier-one mobile network operator customers.
We believe that ByteMobile Smart Capacity has competitive advantages both in
core optimization technology and in its ability to consolidate disparate hardware
and software functionality into a single managed network element.
Competition for CloudBridge, comes in the form of alternative approaches to
making the cloud a secure extension of a companys on-premise enterprise network,
such as WAN optimization, Internet protocol security, or IPSec, or multi-protocol
label switching, or MPLS, network solutions, among others. F5 is a key competitor
in this space. With regards to WAN optimization, CloudBridge also competes with
Cisco and Riverbed Technology, Inc., or Riverbed. Cisco has the largest market
share, benefiting from its leadership in the networking market. Riverbed is
a less established company than Citrix, but has the advantage of being focused
solely on WAN optimization. We believe CloudBridge is a more feature-rich solution
than the other alternatives and provides superior flexibility as part of NetScaler.
VMware is also the main competitor for our CloudPlatform product, which is
an advanced platform for building highly scalable and reliable cloud computing
environments, and our CloudPortal product, which is a comprehensive portal for
provisioning hosted applications, desktops, services and IaaS. Unlike VMwares
products, our CloudPlatform and CloudPortal products draw on the successful
models and experience of large, public cloud implementations and apply them
to enterprise, private clouds. The differentiation and experience of our products
is expanded when coupled with our NetScaler and XenServer products, both of
which are used in large, public cloud implementations. Additionally, OpenStack,
an open source project, provides an alternative solution to our CloudPlatform
product. We believe CloudPlatform has a competitive advantage, as it is production
ready for cloud deployment.
In the server virtualization market, we compete directly with VMware, which
was first to market with this technology and is widely regarded as the market
leader. In addition, we also compete with Microsofts Windows Server 2012 with
Hyper-V. Microsoft first entered this market in 2008 and has since established
its position as a leader in this space. To a lesser extent, and mostly only
in the niche technology areas of test and development, we compete with RedHat,
who recently expanded into this market. We believe XenServer, our server virtualization
product, has features that are competitive with VMwares ESX Server in terms
of performance, scalability and other enterprise-class capabilities. XenServer
is offered as a free download, which significantly increases the reach of server
virtualization to customers of all sizes and geographies. We monetize the XenServer
product line by selling maintenance and updates, which aligns with our CloudPlatform
go-to-market strategy.
Collaboration and Data
Our products for collaboration continue to maintain solid leadership positions
in extremely competitive markets, particularly among, SMBs. We differentiate
our SaaS offerings by designing simple, secure, reliable and cost-efficient
products that deliver a superior customer experience. Our competitors range
from large, established technology firms to small,
Internet-based startups.
In Collaboration, we compete primarily with Cisco WebEx, Microsoft Lync and
Skype, and conferencing call solutions from Intercall, PGi, AT&T and Verizon.
Additionally we compete with freemium products such as Logmeins Join.me and
Googles Google + Hangouts. Our GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining products
have proven to be competitive based on ease-of-use and the All You Can Meet®
pricing model, combined with built-in VoIP and toll-based PSTN audio services.
We further differentiate our collaboration products by integrating OpenVoice
toll-free seamlessly with the built-in VoIP and toll audio services and having
purpose-built solutions for marketing and training use cases. We believe these
features give us competitive advantage among individual, prosumer and SMB customers.
We have been a market leader with our GoToMyPC product for many years. Our
direct competition includes LogMeIn, Inc., or LogMeIn, free solutions such as
Microsofts Live Mesh and those from many Internet startups. In addition, new
remote access features in desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows and
Macintosh OSX provide alternatives to our solution. We endeavor to differentiate
our products by continuing our focus on security, ease-of-use and support for
multiple desktop operating systems.
Our GoToAssist product has achieved a large market share for Web-based clientless
remote support. This product includes a version purpose-built for individual
users, consultants and small businesses, positioning Citrix as the only provider
of remote support solutions for all segments of the market. In remote support,
we compete with Ciscos WebEx and LogMeIn.
In the data sharing market, ShareFiles direct competition includes Dropbox,
Inc., Box, Inc. and HighTail, Inc. (formerly YouSendIt), as well as legacy solutions
like traditional file transfer protocol, or FTP, in the SMB market. Many of
these competitors have strong brand recognition through their consumer and free
versions of their products. However, we believe ShareFile offers a superior
solution as it is built specifically for the needs of businesses. In the Enterprise
segment, there are fewer direct competitors to the ShareFile product. Increased
competition is anticipated as large enterprises need to deploy secure data syncing
and sharing solutions for a growing mobile workforce. We believe that Citrixs
strong reputation in the Enterprise market, along with ShareFiles integration
into Citrix products such as Receiver and XenMobile, and our unique ability
to store data on-premise or in the Cloud, will be a key differentiator.