During the Q4 2009 earnings call, beside the numbers they reported (which were pretty impressive for the climate last year), 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.
Now that the iPad features a much bigger screen (9.7” with a 1024x768 resolution) and remarkable processing capabilities (apparently an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore @ 1GHz), Citrix may have finally found the endpoint device it was waiting for.