Looks like we need to hold off on speculation about the potential sell-off of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and the rest of the Citrix Online division. Liana Baker and Greg Roumeliotis wrote an article on Reuters the other day saying that Citrix is now shopping out the entire company in the hopes of selling it as a complete package.
Wow. That changes the entire value equation. Citrix has a market cap of $11.6 billion, making it a much tougher acquisition cost to justify. And the company has several very different lines of business, making it harder to fold in under an existing infrastructure.
According to the Reuters article (which references "people familiar with the matter"), has Citrix reached out to Dell. I would be surprised if Dell chose to expand its business operations in this much of a new direction. But honestly, it is hard to think of a single buyer who would want Citrix's complete blend of communication, networking, and virtualization services. Suddenly this looks more like a potential play for Cisco. They surprised me when they bought WebEx years ago and they could surprise me again with the purchase of Citrix. At least the product lines fit in with existing Cisco offerings.
If we believe the article, there must be deeper problems at Citrix than just a lack of support for the GoTo product line. The authors include the following foreboding sentence:
"If Citrix does not sell itself in its entirety, it will not just seek to sell or spin off its GoTo products, but it will also explore options for other assets down the line, according to the sources."
Ouch. That has all the earmarks of an emergency fire sale! The jury is out on this one, but what once seemed like a fairly simple division spin-off is now a much bigger deal.
