"It has been a long road for Netscaler, which almost closed its doors in 2002, when its original product was spurned by companies who were choking with excess capacity after the bubble burst, and so didn't need to boost their application delivery.

The deal also allows Citrix to enter Silicon Valley in a big way, beefing up its local arsenal of talent, as it moves to compete against valley companies like Juniper and Cisco. Citrix picks up Netscaler's 200 employees, half of them here in the valley, half in India. Silicon Valley companies, it seems, are getting gobbled up left and right. The deal follows Juniper's $469 million combined acquisition of Redline Networks and Peribit, announced April 26, to access similar technology, and Cisco's move last week to buy FineGround networks for $70 million, which offers a "compression" technology similar to Netscaler's."