Citrix Online Buys Paglo To Fuel Cloud-Based Management Play

In a move that rounds out its suite of GoTo products, Citrix Online has acquired cloud-based IT management vendor Paglo Labs.

While neither company revealed the terms of the acquisition, they said the purchase adds a critical element to Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Citrix Online's suite of SaaS and cloud-based applications, which includes GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, GoToTraining and more. The acquisition closed in January, the two companies said.

Citrix Online is a division of Citrix Systems and in 2009 achieved revenues of $308 million. Paglo, founded in 2007, offers a cloud-based IT management service. It acts as sort of a search engine for IT and logs, letting users and managed service providers capture and store logs and search and analyze them in the cloud by collecting data from networked devices. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Paglo essentially creates an IT system of record, giving businesses and MSPs the ability to discover and identify devices, monitor critical servers and applications in real time; and manage network usage and track configuration changes.

Elizabeth Cholawsky, vice president of products and client services for Citrix Online, said Paglo's offering has been added to the Citrix Online product suite as a new standalone service called GoToManage, which is available now. Cholawsky said Paglo customers and partners won't suffer any downtime during the transition and GoToManage will integrate with Citrix Online's remote support capabilities later this year.

"We were looking for a company that matched the market need," Cholawsky said, adding that acquiring Paglo's IT management SaaS offering fit in with Citrix Online's remote support roadmap. "It's our chance to completely own remote support and enter into the IT services space in a big way."

Citrix Online was the first to hit the market with Web-based remote support roughly a decade ago and last year continued the trend with the addition of GoToAssist Express, a support solution for individuals and small businesses. IDC figures indicate that Citrix Online leads the remote-support market with 34.7 percent worldwide share via GoToAssist services and is also the third largest SaaS vendor globally.

Cholawsky said the launch of GoToManage gives GoToAssist customers new capabilities.

Brian de Haaff, Paglo's CEO, said Paglo's sales structure was made up of roughly half e-commerce and direct sales and half through IT consultants and MSPs. Essentially partners used Paglo to offer proactive monitoring to machines connected across the WAN.

"This is exactly what is needed if you have distributed infrastructure," he said, adding that using Paglo, now GoToManage, MSPs and IT consultants can get a unified view of multiple companies' IT infrastructures and offer proactive monitoring and alerting, while also offering remote access, file transfer capabilities and customer branding and reports.

Cholawsky said that a recent survey found that more than 60 percent of Citrix Online customers wanted some form of monitoring solution. The launch of GoToManage, which Citrix Online will offer as an integrated Web-based platform for monitoring, control and supporting attended and unattended IT infrastructures, fits the bill.

Additionally, the Paglo buy gives Citrix Online and its partner base the ability to attack the growing market for SaaS-based IT management, which Forrester Research estimated could reach $4 billion by 2013.

GoToManage will be aimed at SMBs and MSPs as an alternative to expensive and complex on-premise software, Cholawsky said.

"This gives us a complete palate of GoTo products," she said, adding more products and integration are coming in 2010.

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