Citrix also announced today that Marvin Adams, vice president and chief information officer for Ford Motor Company, has joined Citrix’s board of directors. Adams previously served as a director for Sequoia Software Corporation.
Mark Templeton, president of Citrix, said the acquisition positions Citrix to deliver a more complete application services platform – one that gives users secure access to any information source, business process or application, whether it’s a Web, Windows or UNIX application.
Our customers asked us to extend the capabilities of Citrix NFuse application portal and MetaFrame, our application serving software, to include Web content, Web applications and Web services, he said. We now have a robust suite of XML-based products and technologies to be able to give our customers exactly what they’ve asked for – the ability to easily use any device to find and get connected to any information from anywhere.
Citrix acquired Sequoia in an all-cash transaction, structured as a $5.64 per share tender offer followed by a merger, valued at $184.6 million in the aggregate. Under terms of the acquisition, originally announced March 21, 2001, Citrix will integrate Sequoia along functional lines. Mark Wesker, Sequoia’s founder and president, will join Citrix in Fort Lauderdale as vice president of Internet strategy. Rick Faint, Sequoia’s chief executive officer, will remain in Columbia, Maryland and oversee the integration effort.
Templeton said the two company’s products, personnel and sales models greatly complement each other, and will help Citrix execute on one of its key strategies of expanding application serving within the enterprise. Customers can now look to our systems integrators and channel partners for two key pieces of their strategic applications platform, he said.
Templeton added that mid-market customers, already well served by the reseller channel, will benefit from the creation of new products based on the same technologies.
Citrix will schedule a conference call in mid-May to discuss the financial outlook in connection with the acquisition.
As a result of the merger between Sequoia and a wholly owned subsidiary of Citrix, Sequoia is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Citrix. Citrix intends to promptly file a Form 15 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which will terminate the registration of Sequoia’s common stock and suspend Sequoia’s reporting obligations under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.
