F5 CEO: We’ve Flipped ‘Several Hundred’ Citrix Netscaler Customers

‘We have only scratched the surface, frankly, of the installed business of Citrix,’ F5 CEO Francois Locoh-Donou tells CRN in an exclusive interview.

F5 CEO Francois Locoh-Donou said the company has moved “several hundred” customers off rival Citrix’s Netscaler load-balancing and application delivery platform over the last couple of years and the pace of customer defections is not slowing down.

“We continue to have a lot of success removing Citrix from many customers’ environments. They’re basically in the business at the moment of pushing customers toward F5, and we absolutely must take advantage of that at this point in time,” Locoh-Donou said at the Seattle-based company's AppWorld 2025 event at the end of February.

F5 is actively going after Citrix customers and flipping these businesses to F5 in the wake of Citrix’s channel changes, Locoh-Donou told CRN in an exclusive interview.

F5’s success comes with a number of Citrix customers complaining to CRN about higher prices for renewals with longer terms. Citrix partners, meanwhile, are furious about the company’s move to reduce partner margins as part of a focus on top customers that has resulted in the company taking some deals direct.

The latest twist in the Citrix channel drama came with Citrix recently announcing that it was cutting a number of distributors, including Ingram Micro and TD Synnex. Arrow will exclusively service Citrix’s midmarket and small and midsize businesses in North America and Europe—customers contributing less than $250,000 in revenue to Citrix.

Arrow will become the sole Citrix distributor for both continents, across 17 countries, on June 2.

In an email to CRN, Citrix said that its recent changes and expanded relationship with Arrow, the company’s largest distributor in North America and Europe, “will open up new markets, customers and investments for our partners and customers alike,” the spokesperson said.

“Citrix customers recognize the value of our complete portfolio and our Universal Hybrid Multi Cloud and Citrix Platform License offerings. ADC [application delivery controller] is an extremely important component of that platform. Citrix remains fully committed to delivering value for our customers in the entire Citrix platform, including the value that NetScaler brings as part of that portfolio. In 2024, our partner-fulfilled bookings grew 45 percent, marking three consecutive years of growth in the channel for Citrix, and our commercial business continues to be 100 percent channel-driven,” the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, F5’s Lisa Citron, vice president of the company’s global partner ecosystem, confirmed to CRN that in addition to the “exponentially more” Citrix customers the company has gained in recent years, F5 is also picking up former Citrix partners in its efforts.

An executive for a national solution provider, who did not want to be identified, said he has seen customers replace Citrix NetScaler with F5 as Citrix’s market share in the application delivery space erodes. “Citrix, I think, is on their last leg from a NetScaler standpoint,” said the executive.

F5’s success is coming despite the fact that Citrix last year unveiled a Universal Hybrid Multi-Cloud license that includes unlimited NetScaler licenses.

One Citrix and F5 partner executive who spoke to CRN under the condition of anonymity said that his company is planning to do more work with F5 as a direct result of the changes Citrix has made to its channel strategy.

“I would love to replace every single implementation of Citrix we have because of the way they’re behaving in the channel,” said the executive.

Citrix in 2022 was acquired and taken private by investment firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital—an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management. Citrix was then merged with Palo Alto, Calif.-based Tibco and a new parent organization, CSG, was created. Citrix is now raising prices “significantly” on customers, which began happening after the company was acquired by private equity, the executive said.

Citrix’s changes are opening the door for F5 to gain a horde of new customers that are very unhappy with Citrix right now, the executive said, applauding the F5 partner and customer recruitment campaign.

“If I were F5, I would be going to find all of the Citrix clients up for renewal,” the executive said.

Citrix has pulled “massive” deals away from channel partners, the executive said. The partner organization recently had a large customer that was up for renewal for a multimillion-dollar deal, but Citrix told the customer that the SKU was no longer available. Instead, it would have to pay double for a five-year renewal deal.

“[Citrix] literally held the customer hostage until the customer’s licenses expired. The customer’s business was going to go down. The customer ended up having to pay them and they are super mad, to a point where they’re working on a project to remove Citrix from their environment and go to F5,” the executive said.

Locoh-Donou told CRN that F5 has been consistently displacing Citrix over the last couple of years.

“I think, first of all, [Citrix] made some quite unfortunate decisions with their partners and around how they are approaching customers … and customers have a long memory,” he said. “In the short run, I think it may well pay off in terms of their financial model, but F5—we are a very long-term-focused company. We have this mission and drive to say we’re going to build a better digital world with our partners [and] our customers. That happens over time—understanding their applications [and] always innovating to make it easier to deliver applications."

F5’s philosophy and long-term approach to technology development is attractive to end customers and it’s also important to the channel, Locoh-Donou said.

“We’re going to be there for our customers, innovate where they need us to innovate and do that over the long term. And when we do that, they’ll find value and we make money," he said.

Citrix NetScaler held 28 percent revenue share against F5 Big-IP’s 42 percent in 2020. Since then, however, Citrix/NetScaler’s revenue share dropped to 21 percent in 2024, while F5’s has remained steady, according to telecom and networking research firm DellO’ro Group.

The Citrix Displacement Opportunity

With product refreshes on the minds of many customers right now, the Citrix displacement opportunity looms large for partners, Locoh-Donou said.

“We have only scratched the surface, frankly, of the installed business of Citrix,” he said.

F5’s Big-IP hardware and software portfolio for improved application performance and security competes with Citrix NetScaler, the company’s platform for application delivery and security. While both companies have had offerings in this space for more than two decades, F5 has emerged as the winner, with many Citrix customers “absolutely” looking to jump to F5, in part because of F5’s focused approach to the ADC and security market, said Austin Geraci, CTO of F5 partner WorldTech IT, Austin, Texas, which was recently named F5’s North America Partner of the Year.

Citrix, on the other hand, has been distracted by its core VDI business, Geraci said.

Meanwhile, the Citrix NetScaler product has not advanced, he said.

“They’re not investing in the product, and they’re making all the wrong investments,” he said. “Feature functionality, stability, as well as the price and lack of support—those are the big things that I’ve heard directly out of the customers’ mouth. That experience has definitely deteriorated for them.”

F5, for its part, has continued to develop its application delivery portfolio, while completing “focused” acquisitions to enrich their products with more features, reliability, more security, Geraci said.

Citrix acquired NetScaler in 2005, after which the then-load-balancing technology became largely affiliated with the Citrix VDI use case, according to Mauricio Sanchez, senior research director for DellO’ro Group.

“The glass has been half-full, half-empty. It’s half-full because NetScaler enjoys the strong attach to Citrix VDI, and with Citrix VDI having a large customer base, it has served as a captive audience for NetScaler. However, the glass is half-empty because up until recently, the ability for NetScaler to go after non-Citrix sales was limited,” said Sanchez, who covers the enterprise networking and security markets.