It’s unsurprising to see legacy providers shifting their business models from perpetual software licensing to subscription-based pricing. Some do it with a measure of grace. But lately, some licensees of virtual desktops and applications have been confronted with abrupt changes and even forced to accept and pay for unwanted features. However, there are ways for alienated customers to protect their best interests.

This past year has been rife with complaints over a substantial licensing change by Citrix after it was acquired by private equity firms and merged with TIBCO Software. Those changes remarkably parallel a playbook that VMware customers experienced in the wake of their vendor being acquired by Broadcom.

For those paying close attention, substantive changes were foreshadowed in 2023 when it was quietly noted that perpetual software maintenance licenses would not be renewed upon expiration. Even those paying attention back then have been hit with what they consider even more egregious changes, and some are citing licensing cost increases of 300% or more.

Specifically, some organizations have griped that while they asked for renewal terms six months or more before their deadlines, those requests went into a dark hole until as little as 30 days remained on their current agreement. That’s too late for an organization with substantial numbers of users—or even just a few—to evaluate and prepare for a switch if they so desire.

When they receive a replacement, er, “renewal” proposal, surprises abound. First, separately licensed products are now “features” within a universal license. For most, that means paying for shelfware they’ll never use while absorbing sometimes astounding price hikes from what they were accustomed to.

Some organizations are coming away from licensing discussions convinced they can only obtain 3-year or 5-year agreements! So much for pay-as-you-go subscription models and winning your customer’s trust every day.

Moreover, many are being shifted to new support models while being gaslighted the changes are in their best interests. Only select customers—by invitation only—are being offered platform licenses and support. Most are being shifted toward channel partners. Not only that, but channel partners handling 2,000 or fewer licenses have themselves been shifted to a third-party provider.

Citrix has allegedly made major changes to its partner program, and one of the consultancies briefed on the new arrangements said that when the news was delivered to a gathering of the Citrix faithful the result was “stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief.”

One reason for that reaction is a change to licensing for partners that, we understand, will see Citrix charge double the price for its wares unless partners pay upfront for a year.

Those wares will be bundled as “Citrix Universal for CSP” that encompasses “the best Citrix and NetScaler capabilities”, we are told. That bundle sounds a lot like the “Citrix Platform” license announced earlier this month for end-user customers.

A Citrix partner of our acquaintance described the license as “everything included including all the bits you don’t need.”

Citrix appears to have justified the cost increase on grounds that a “flexible monthly model introduces a level of incremental costs and uncertainty into the business.” The biz has also pitched the annual licenses as a way for partners to lock in costs and prices for their customers, rather than being buffeted by potential cost increases during a year.

The price increase will kick in from September 1, 2024.

Sources – who requested anonymity due to an ongoing Citrix relationship – told of the new bundle, and it has also appeared in a pair of Thursday Reddit posts that appear to reproduce the content of a letter sent to Citrix partners.

Attempts have been made to authenticate the letter, but Citrix and its parent company Cloud Software Group have not responded to many of our recent requests – nor to this one at the time of writing.

Among the other changes it is understood are afoot are a reduction in rebates paid to channel partners, leaving them with marking up license costs – and services, natch – as a source of revenue.

It is believed that Citrix did not inform all partners of these changes at once – some were briefed in recent days, others located in different countries haven’t yet been told the news.

One Citrix partner who had not been briefed on the changes told us that, if our information was accurate, he would likely quit Citrix and instead focus on Microsoft’s Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

The document we believe to be Citrix’s letter to its partners mentions “more than two million active subscribers today ” – some of whom will not immediately be ready to switch to Windows 365 or any rival desktop-as-a-service platform.

But between the changes we believe Citrix is making, and VMware by Broadcom’s spin-out of its end-user compute products, virtual desktop users have very good reasons to consider their alternatives.

Citrix has created a “Platform License” that it will offer by invitation only, and stopped selling some products outside bundles.

The new license covers everything Citrix already develops – plus any code it acquires in future – and is billed as everything needed to run, secure, and manage virtual desktops, the endpoints that touch them, and the networks that deliver them. The latter functions come from the NetScaler application delivery suite, which just last year was rebranded from Citrix ADC to help it compete as a standalone offering.

Citrix Analytics, uberAgent, and Citrix Secure Private Access are also bundled under the Platform License – but are no longer sold as standalone products.

VMware customers may find that arrangement familiar, as it’s pretty much exactly what Broadcom just did with the virtualization giant’s products.

Like Broadcom, Citrix has justified selling bundles on the grounds of making life simpler for customers.

“Previously, you had to navigate a variety of editions and add-ons to get valuable features such as workspace environment management, provisioning, or ServiceNow Integration,” wrote Citrix general manager Sridhar Mullapudi. “Likewise, there were countless variations of NetScaler features and capacity to decide on.

“We have eliminated all of that complexity, making all Citrix enterprise-grade capabilities available in two, value-driven platform-based offerings that include not just DaaS and VDI [desktop-as-a-service and desktop virtualization] – but also the industry-leading capabilities of NetScaler for application delivery and security.”

The second platform Mullapudi mentioned is called “Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud” and adds NetScaler and Citrix Endpoint Management to the Universal License Citrix introduced in March 2023 – though the NetScaler license is limited to throughput capacity of 1000Gbit/sec.

Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud is only offered for 250 or more seats. It’s unclear what makes a buyer eligible for the Platform License.

Both license bundles include support and educational material.

Citrix’s intent for these licenses is clear: aside from getting you to buy all its stuff, Mullapudi pitched the platform as an alternative to VMware’s Horizon virtual desktop suite, which has just been acquired by KKR. Citrix’s boss suggested Horizon users who migrate will appreciate the presence of NetScaler as it means they can do without licenses for rival application delivery controllers and VPNs.

The debut of the Platform License comes a year and three days after Citrix stopped selling perpetual licenses and required subscriptions.

The Register made several requests for a chat about that strategy – all of which were rebuffed.

We’ve asked for details on the new licenses – especially pricing and the fate of standalone subscriptions for all Citrix products – and were advised that those who understood the nuances could not be reached in the early evening Pacific Time, but that a response should be forthcoming the next morning. We’ll update this story if we receive a substantive response.

Another matter we’ve asked Citrix’s parent company, Cloud Software Group, to comment on is the strategy of the freshly independent server virtualization business, XenServer.

We mention that in this story because neither Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud nor the Platform License includes server virtualization – an interesting omission as past iterations of Citrix strategy emphasized tuning its hypervisors to be the optimal environment for hosting its other wares.