History
Citrix was founded in Richardson, Texas in 1989 by former IBM developer Ed Iacobucci, with $3 million in funding. Following its initial setup and development, Iacobucci moved the company to his former home of Coral Springs, Florida.
Citrix was originally named Citrus but changed its name after an existing company claimed trademark rights. The Citrix name is a portmanteau of Citrus and UNIX.
Many of the original founding members had participated in the IBM OS/2 project. Iacobucci's vision was to build OS/2 with multi-user support. IBM was not interested in this idea, so Iacobucci left. Iacobucci was offered a job at Microsoft as chief technical officer of its networking group but turned it down to start his own company.
The company's first product was Citrix MULTIUSER, which was based on OS/2. Citrix licensed the OS/2 source code from Microsoft, bypassing IBM. Citrix hoped to capture part of the UNIX market by making it easy to deploy text-based OS/2 applications. The product failed to find a market. This was due in part to Microsoft declaring in 1991 that it was no longer going to support OS/2.
Roger Roberts was appointed the CEO of Citrix in 1990. Roberts, a Texan, came from Texas Instruments.
From 1989 to 1995, the company did not turn a profit. In 1989 and 1990 there was no income at all. Between 1991 and 1993, Citrix received funding from both Intel and Microsoft as well as venture capitalists. Without the help of this funding, Citrix would not have survived.
In 1993, Citrix purchased the product "Netware Access Server" from Novell. It was a remote access application built on DOS and Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager. It provided desktop and applications from the server to multiple users in a similar way Terminal Servers still do. Citrix developed the product further and released it as WinView. It became Citrix's first successful product.
The company went public in December 1995.
Read more about this topic: Citrix Systems
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