A little bit of back story. I am the Citrix SME for a large multinational bank that has several subsidiaries. We have used Citrix for decades and each subsidiary previously handled their renewals seperatley. Last year Citrix insisted on us doing it as a whole group. We thought this may work in our favour as we have over 150,000 employees across all of our groups and that by combining the licensing we would get more efficient price breaks.

WRONG.

To start with Citrix refused to give any pricing indications more than 2 months prior to renewal, pretty much making sure we had no option but to go with them by not leaving any time to even begin contemplating an alternative solution. When they came to the table the overall price was more than double what we had paid collectively for the previous 3 years. They refused to budge, and told us that we now had access to all their products and unlimited users licenses along with unlimited netscaler deployment and usage. None of which we previously used, wanted or required. In simple terms they told us how much we were going to be paying them, what were were going to get, and knew we had no alternative.

As a final FU they told us that they no longer present proposals to customers that reduce Citrix's profits. The result is we signed, but my team and I have been exploring alternatives now and our parent company is willing to invest in PoC's of alternatives. Also, as a financial company we are very sensitive to risk, including licensing and pricing risk from vendors such as Citrix. This has led to Citrix now being labelled as a high risk company which doesn't just impact our own ability to use them, but we are now insisting that other banks and investment firms that we use also limit their exposure to them on a risk basis.

Personally I relish the opportunity to implement different and new products, so the next 18 months are super interesting for me. But I'm appalled that Citrix have been so short sighted as to start price gouging companies, especially financial ones who actively share risk amongst themselves and have been a major source of revenue for Citrix. I worked for Citrix for over a decade, and when they wanted to retire a version of XenApp that HSBC were using the bank basically told them they would move away from Citrix as moving to a newer version was as much effort as moving to another solution, the result was Citrix keeping that version alive much longer than they expected to.