At the end of July Citrix announced the financial results for Q2 2009.
Like VMware, also this company is managing well the worldwide financial crisis, keeping a flat revenue and a nice profit growth, but it’s still unclear how positive has been the release of XenServer for free. In details:
Citrix Q2 revenue is flat compared to Q2 2008, staying at $369M.
The new licenses revenue is down 15% while the license renewal revenue is up 9% along with technology services revenue (+3%) and the online services revenue (+18%).
In Americas Citrix gains 3% while in EMEA it loses 12% in revenue.
The company reports a 23% profits increase, up to $42.5M compared to $34.6M in Q2 2008.
A more detailed analysis reveals that the XenApp business is losing 8%, while the NetScaler business is up 4% in revenue but the most important fact is that the XenDesktop business is grew 250% from Q2 2008, and more than 50% compared to Q1 2009.
Interestingly, Citrix is reporting that about 20 customers (10 just in Q2 2009) have XenDesktop environments with more than 1000 seats. The largest XenDesktop customer, Collier County Schools, has now reached 12,000 virtual desktops and Citrix claims it could be the largest VDI implementation in the world at the moment.
Overall the XenDesktop business unit secured 200 new customers the last quarter.
No specific details were provided about how XenServer support licenses and Essentials licenses revenue scored during Q2, but Citrix reports over 100,000 downloads in this period for its free hypervisor.
Compared to the crazy hiring rate that VMware had in the last few months, Citrix was substantially flat in the headcount and so there’s not a significant increase in the operating expenses.
Citrix is very conservative in its forecast as it expects a flat growth for Q3 2009.
The earnings call full transcript is available here, courtesy of Seeking Alpha.