Citrix closes Sydney lab, sacks staff

Citrix Labs Sydney has closed, with long-time staffers publicly declaring their last day at the virtual desktop vendor.

The news broke on Twitter earlier this month, with Sydney Lab engineers Jeff Muir and Donovan Hackett saying goodbye:

Today was my last day at Citrix. Everyone in Citrix Labs Sydney was let go. Looking forward to the next journey. pic.twitter.com/k9xfda7vf0

— Jeff Muir (@JeffMuirAu) January 13, 2016

Well last day at Citrix. The Sydney Labs site has been made redundant so there's some mighty fine engineers moving onto something new.

— Donovan Hackett (@Donovan_RH) January 13, 2016

Muir, Hackett and other members of the now-defunct team declined to comment further, citing "authorisation". CRN contacted both Citrix and Citrix Australia repeatedly but the vendor did not respond. 

However, a Citrix spokesperson did tell The Register: "We made the decision to bring the CTO office into the business units. With CTOs sitting in the business units, they are tightly linked to the product strategy and customer needs. We scaled back the advanced products group in general as we refocussed on our core businesses."

Warren Simondson, owner of Citrix partner Ctrl-Alt-Del IT Consultancy, said the vendor "should be ashamed for this move”.

“If Citrix Asia-Pacific sales and marketing team did their job, Citrix wouldn’t be in such a poor position. It’s time to clean out the cupboard on a poor sales, marketing and sales engineer team, and focus on bringing the company back to greatness,” he said.

Citrix Labs Sydney had its final day while in the same week “sales and marketing and partner fools are living it up in Las Vegas at the Citrix Summit”, said Simondson. “I’ve never seen such a contradiction.”

The Register reported that about 30 people are affected by the closure of the unit, which was responsible for developing some of the most popular desktop virtualisation technologies for Citrix.

Citrix had announced in November that 1,000 jobs - about 10 percent of its global workforce - would be cut that month and in January. The vendor expected about US$200 million in pre-tax savings from the restructure.

“This team is the innovation engine in the company but has been let go due to a spreadsheet exercise in cost cutting," said Simondson. "In my humble opinion, a most short-sighted decision whose deep impact will become self evident... A small crack team of innovators is now available.”