Vista Equity and Evergreen Coast Capitals’ $16.5 billion takeover of Citrix is starting to look a lot like another high-profile software vendor’s Wall Street exit from just a few months back.

The deal, which will see Citrix taken private and merged with business intelligence vendor Tibco, bears a striking resemblance to the strategy employed in Symphony Technology Group’s (STG) McAfee-FireEye acquisition and merger.

Both Citrix and McAfee have storied histories dating back decades, and each has pivoted on numerous occasions over the years to stay relevant as the markets have evolved and matured.

After McAfee’s brief return to the stock market in 2020, STG swooped in to acquire the security vendor in a $4 billion all-cash deal. And shortly after, the private equity firm snatched up FireEye in a deal valued at $1.2 billion. The security firms officially merged last month to form Trellix, but not before McAfee’s secure access service edge (SASE) platform was spun off into a yet-to-be-named business.

And it appears the Citrix-Tibco merger could end similarly, according to Dell’Oro Group analyst Mauricio Sanchez.

“Citrix being taken private wasn’t necessarily too surprising,” Sanchez told SDxCentral. “Being taken private is a good move for them in so far as they get to step away from the quarterly onslaught from the Street.”

Over the past few years, Citrix, like so many other tech companies, has moved toward a subscription, as-a-service model, he explained. “I think the Street just ran out of patience with them.”

The decision to merge Citrix with Tibco, a business intelligence provider offering a broad range of software integration and consulting services, makes a lot of sense, Sanchez added.

However, not all of Citrix’s assets are a natural fit for the combined company. “Some definitely make sense, in particular the side of the house that dealt with digital workspaces — the content collaboration, the app, and desktop virtualization,” he said, adding that on the other hand, Citrix’s application delivery and security assets, which include the vendor’s SD-WAN and early SASE platforms, might make more sense spun off as a standalone company.

This product division was formed following the acquisition of NetScaler in 2005 at a time when virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), WAN optimization, and networking appeared to be converging, he explained. “This was before SD-WAN came into view and upset the applecart and before SaaS applications and security really became a big thing.”

As these trends disrupted the industry over the last decade, cloud access security broker (CASB) and secure web gateway (SWG) vendors like Zscaler found a foothold, he added.

While Citrix’s application delivery and security division might not be a great fit for the combined Citrix-Tibco, that’s not to say the vendor’s SD-WAN and SASE assets are bad products, Sanchez emphasized.

“It’s not necessarily a knock on the technology itself,” he said, adding that the division of Citrix specializing in VDI likely targeted a very different customer than SD-WAN or network security.

“It’s very difficult for the sales team to be able to deal with customer relationships that aren’t necessarily one in the same and do both well,” he explained.

In other words, it might be difficult to sell SD-WAN or SASE to a customer heavily invested in Citrix’s VDI and application virtualizing services because they’re dealing with different challenges and use cases.

So it wouldn't surprise Sanchez to see the combined company spin off Citrix’s more networking-focused products as a standalone company, the same way STG did with McAfee-FireEye.

“I’m going to be watching what they do with these assets,” he said. “There are some jewels that could still be of great value moving forward.”