Caymas customers cut loose

The former customers of Caymas Systems will have to figure out for themselves what to do now that the company has pulled the plug on product development and customer support.

When Citrix bought Caymas last week, it picked up a team of nine developers and engineers, but not Caymas products or customer support, says Sanjay Uppal, vice president of marketing for Citrix's Application Networking Group and the former CEO of Caymas.

That leaves a bad taste in the mouths of some customers.

For example, Kim Hansen a network analyst for the City of Sioux Falls, S. D., says the city needs to keep using its Caymas gear for a while until it can budget for a replacement. So the city will look for used devices to set up in high-availability mode to guard against a hardware failure.

But with no software upgrades being developed for the Caymas appliances, it is just a matter of time before upgrades to browsers render the SSL VPN capabilities of the equipment useless. Coincidentally, the City of Sioux Falls has a Citrix SSL gateway that it can fire up if it needs to, Hansen says.

“My biggest question is why isn't Citrix continuing support or a migration path for Caymas customers? I can guarantee you that our next SSL vendor will be based on size and dollars, and not just features and ease of use. I need a company that is going to be around in the long run,” Hansen says.

When Caymas ran into financial trouble a few months ago, it created a separate business entity called Caymas for the Assignment of Benefit of Creditors LLC. The purpose of it was to shop around Caymas assets and sell what it could. “The technologies that remain are ones that cannot be monitized very easily. They will be liquidated and then the original Caymas Systems will be shut down,” Uppal says.

Uppal says Citrix may be able to meet the needs of some Caymas customers, depending on what they used the Caymas gear for.

“The responsibility to the customers lies with the company that was assigned the assets,” he says. “That company doesn't have the wherewithal to continue that support and that support has to be terminated immediately. However, we obviously want to see what we can do.”

Integration plans

Meanwhile, Citrix plans to integrate the Caymas Systems policy engine and access controls into its application networking gear as a way for customers to better control network application access.

That is the overall plan for the purchase Citrix made of Caymas’ intellectual property and team. But it will be weeks before the company has a clearly defined road map for the integration.

"The key was getting the people and their capabilities,” says. “We're going to help across the entire product line.”

That line consists of Citrix's NetScaler Application Delivery Controller, WANScaler WAN-optimization appliance, Citrix Application Firewall and Citrix Access Gateway SSL VPN gear.

"It's those four core pieces,” says Uppal. “We're going to take our expertise and capabilities and help across several of those products.… We don't have any integrated product road map and I'm not sure when we will.”