Published on the 10/02/2017 | Written by Anthony Caruana
After a six-month courtship, the marriage between Citrix’s GoTo business and LogMeIn has been consummated…
Chances are that if you’ve shared a screen, attended an online meeting or participated in a webinar over the last few years, you’d be familiar with LogMeIn and Citrix’s GoTo applications. They’re so popular even hackers use them in scams when duping people into providing remote access to their computers.
Now, the two software houses are merging in a US$1.8 billion deal to create what they say will be one of the ten largest SaaS companies in the world. The Citrix GoTo brand will disappear, with LogMeIn winning the battle of who gets to keep their name.
The merger brings Citrix’s GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist, GoToAssist Corporate, GoToMyPC, Grasshopper and Openvoice products into the same family as LogMeIn Pro, LogMeIn Central, LogMeIn Rescue, Rescue Lens, BoldChat, join.me, Xively, and LastPass.
That’s one heck of a Brady Bunch!
At this stage, there are no plans to move customers from their current applications so there’s no need to worry if you depend on one of the affected apps or services. Nor is pricing directly affected, but there are new terms of services that cover all the programs across the merged companies.
Analyst Joe Sweeney from IBRS Research and Advisory Services wondered what benefit can be gained given the two entities share significant product overlap.
“Maybe this is a matter of them saying it’s better to be together in order to take advantage of Citrix’s relationship with Microsoft. One thing that is clear is that companies are increasingly accessing remote systems and it’s not through discrete software but through cloud services.”
Sweeney said it’s likely both companies saw the writing on the wall and decided they would have a better chance of long-term survival together rather than in competition. And while it’s possible the newly merged entity might be forming in order to consolidate their customer bases in order to have an expanded market share, this wasn’t clear from the information Sweeney had seen so far.
With Microsoft, Cisco, Atlassian, and Slack making inroads into the under-nourished collaboration software market, this merger signals one of the first steps towards consolidation. Slack recently upped the ante with its push into the enterprise market and this move by GoTo and LogMeIn positions the new business for the increasingly competitive market.
Another likely benefit of the merger is access to different types of customers. Sweeney noted LogMeIn’s popularity with SMEs and smaller companies, while Citrix has a stronger presence in larger enterprises. It’s likely, he said, the new company would, eventually, streamline its product set to meet the needs of a much broader cross section of businesses than any one of the companies had managed on its own.
Sweeney also said collaboration services are becoming increasingly commoditised. This is seen in the way other vendors, such as Microsoft, have added more sophisticated collaboration tools into applications such as the Microsoft Office suite. This increasing market pressure may also be a driver, as the newly merged LogMeIn and GoTo tries to embed itself in its client base.
