Historically, our worst acquisition was Sequoia Software. It was a lot of money for something that really didn’t pan out. The official number was $184 million but I believe it was a bit higher.
Internally we saw this a failure for a few different reasons. Probably the most painful lesson is that we could not successfully integrate a company like this fully into our operation. I heard statements that engineering actually hindered the process of integration but not necessarily intentionally. Future acquisitions would be based on attempting to keep the existing company structure in place. In some cases, this meant creating new divisions.
There was a lot of hype around portals in 2001 and it later turned out that the market would become fairly common place. On top of that we did not have the most ideal portal. The attempt was to create a portal line independent of MetaFrame but in the end it really became a portal for MetaFrame.
I don’t think Citrix got its money value out of this deal. As a result, Citrix would end up becoming much more cautious in future acquisitions.
http://www.citrix.com/site/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2052
Financial Releases
Citrix to Acquire Sequoia Software to Extend “Virtual Workplace” Vision
Citrix and Sequoia Software today announced that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Citrix to acquire Sequoia
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. and COLUMBIA, Md. — 3/21/2001 — Citrix Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:CTXS), a global leader in application server software and services, and Sequoia Software Corporation (Nasdaq:SQSW), the leading provider of XML-based portal software, today announced that the two companies have signed a definitive agreement for Citrix to acquire Sequoia. The all-cash transaction, structured as a $5.64 per share tender offer, is valued at $184.6 million.
By adding Sequoia’s portal products and technology to Citrix’s existing application serving software, Citrix will be uniquely positioned to deliver a more complete application services platform — one that gives users secure access to any information source, business process or application, whether it’s a Web, Windows® or UNIX® application.
Live near Brisbane, Australia. Software developer currently focused on iOS and Android. Avid Google Local Guide
Red Circle Blog 
If I’m not mistaken the removal of Access Centers from the Access Gateway Advanced 4.5 release last Friday marks the end of the Sequoia era.
[…] Those of you using the Advanced edition (previously known as Advanced Access Control [Option]) get a new and improved End-Point Analysis (EPA) infrastructure, along with a new SDK and the task of upgrading scans (though a few new ones have been thrown in too for things like browser, platform and bandwidth as well as the Windows Security Center). Although you lose Access Centers (which I believe marks the end of the Sequoia era) you get the ability to point at multiple Web Interface instances, along with the ability to cache credentials (a useful feature for those wanting to provide seamless access to CPS for Unix farms that was previously provided by the Program Neighbourhood (PN) Content Delivery Agent (CDA) in the Access Center). You also get better integration with SharePoint, which is apparently a good thing (although I would argue otherwise as IMO SharePoint enables users to abuse knowledge in the same way that Access and Excel allow users to abuse data). Less obvious improvements include the ability to log on with [Alternative] UPNs, some web proxy enhancements and the ability to use stateless load balancers (which is also still a large part of the reason why Replication of Advanced Access Control Farm Databases is Not Supported – the session information is constantly updated in the database and it is unforutnately not yet possible to separate this frequently written data from the more static configuration, in much the same way as would be the case with CPS were the memory based dynamic store committed to the RDBMS based data store; presumably what this means is that it is no longer necessary to persist connections to a given server during the login process as was previously the case). In terms of administration you can also now monitor VPN sessions and backup the configuration. […]
[…] Those of you using the Advanced edition (previously known as Advanced Access Control [Option]) get a new and improved End-Point Analysis (EPA) infrastructure, along with a new SDK and the task of upgrading scans (though a few new ones have been thrown in too for things like browser, platform and bandwidth as well as the Windows Security Center). Although you lose Access Centers (which I believe marks the end of the Sequoia era) you get the ability to point at multiple Web Interface instances, along with the ability to cache credentials (a useful feature for those wanting to provide seamless access to CPS for Unix farms that was previously provided by the Program Neighbourhood (PN) Content Delivery Agent (CDA) in the Access Center). You also get better integration with SharePoint, which is apparently a good thing (although I would argue otherwise as IMO SharePoint enables users to abuse knowledge in the same way that Access and Excel allow users to abuse data). Less obvious improvements include the ability to log on with [Alternative] UPNs, some web proxy enhancements and the ability to use stateless load balancers (which is also still a large part of the reason why Replication of Advanced Access Control Farm Databases is Not Supported – the session information is constantly updated in the database and it is unforutnately not yet possible to separate this frequently written data from the more static configuration, in much the same way as would be the case with CPS were the memory based dynamic store committed to the RDBMS based data store; presumably what this means is that it is no longer necessary to persist connections to a given server during the login process as was previously the case). In terms of administration you can also now monitor VPN sessions and backup the configuration. […]
[…] to the 4.5 downloads. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it! Published Wednesday, 18 October 2006 9:45 AM by Aaron Parker Filed under: Advanced AccessControl, Access Gateway […]
Access Gateway 4.5 / Access Gateway Advanced 4.5 Released…
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