During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers we report below, the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton provided a couple of interesting details about the company’s past performance and future plans.
Citrix grew 9% during 2009, for a total of $451 million in revenue.
Revenue from new license sales was $168 million, up 4% from 2008, and up 30% from Q3, while license update revenue increased 6% from 2008.
Technical services increased 20%, led by support, maintenance agreements, and online SaaS revenue was $82 million, up 18%.
Citrix closed 5 deals with over 10,000 seats for XenDesktop in Q4 2009, reaching around 3,000 total XenDesktop customers.
The company also counted over 20,000 XenServer downloads in that quarter.
Talking about the future, Citrix already has a Receiver for the just announced Apple iPad.
The prompt availability, well before Apple can start to ship the tablet worldwide, doesn’t surprise at all: for the last two years Citrix has openly discussed the idea of a Nirvana device that, coupled with their XenApp infrastructure, could finally offer mobility without compromised productivity.
Citrix rushed to deliver its remote desktop client, Receiver, to the AppStore when Apple launched the iPhone, despite its dimensions are less than ideal for the job.
Now that the iPad features a much bigger screen (9.7” with a 1024×768 resolution) and remarkable processing capabilities (apparently an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore @ 1GHz), Citrix may have finally found the endpoint device it was waiting for.
For the full year 2010, the company expects that total revenue will be in the range of $1.74 billion to $1.76 billion.
During the Q&A session at the end of the call, Templeton also acknowledged the VMware presence and capabilities in the desktop virtualization market, but also said that Citrix wins most strategic deals when competing with them:
Question from Abhey Lamba – ISI Group
Mark can you talk about the competition in the desktop virtualization space, who do you see most and what is making you win projects there.Answer from Mark Templeton
Obviously we see VMware mostly with their view product in the marketplace. Let’s face it, they’ve been actually out in the virtual desktop space for a long time and have stimulated a lot of customer interest. Half of that interest when we get engaged, we talk with the customer really I think a lot more strategically about desktop virtualization and the full stack and so forth, and they realize that VDI which is really what VMware has been able to offer so far, just by itself is limited in terms of its applicability and with XenDesktop 4, we actually have a system that provides all these different virtual desktop delivery methodologies including apps on demand and all the very robust HDX technology.
…
When we go head-to-head in VDI, we are winning most of those and again based on having a superior user experience, as well as better utilization of network resources and equal or better virtual machine densities, so you know there are a lot of competitive sort of points but most of the times when we get to look at the deal we’ve got a very, very high win rate and you can tell that by the numbers we reported and you can certainly see that most of the business, 95% of the licensing was skewed towards the Enterprise and Platinum edition which actually have all of the features that I mentioned.
Even more interestingly, Citrix revealed that there’s almost no interest in the new VDI edition of XenDesktop 4.0, introduced in October 2009, after many users complained about the new price structure:
Question from Bhavan Suri – William Blair
Just a couple of quick questions here, you mentioned that 50% of XenDesktop was Enterprise and Platinum. I’m so, is it logical to think that the other 50% is potentially cannibalizing some of the XenApp base, so are folks from XenApp adding to the VDI version or the standard version of XenDesktop on top of their existing XenApp licenses.Answer from David Henshall
Actually Bhuvan, let me make a correction. It’s actually more than 90%, actually 95% that’s coming from the Enterprise and Platinum edition, and very little revenue is coming out of the VDI edition. There’s just not real high customer interest in the VDI only solution.
Thanks to Seeking Alpha for the call transcript.