RALEIGH – Consistent reports about looming layoffs at Citrix  to be announced on March 13 have circulated recently on TheLayoff, a website devoted to tracking job cuts. But the company denies that job cuts are planned.

Citrix actually is hiring.

“No, nothing planned,” Citrix spokesperson Eric Armstrong tells WRAL TechWire.

“In fact, we are actively recruiting for about 70 positions in Raleigh.”

Citrix has a significant operation based in Raleigh where it built a new building to house ShareFile, the startup Citrix acquired from entrepreneurer Jess Lipson in 2011 for $54 million.

How many jobs Citrix maintains in Raleigh is crucial for the company to receive some $5.7 million in tax incentives that were awarded to the company contingent on it adding 400 new positions it announced in December 2016. The state of North Carolina told WRAL TechWire last fall that progress toward the new jobs total would be reviewed in March 2018.

Citrix had some 900 workers in Raleigh when the expansion and tax incentive package were announced.

‘RIF action’ predicted

Job cuts were made by Citrix, which provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service, and cloud computing technologies, last fall, and talk about more layoffs have continued.

Talk about a March 13 announcement has circulated for several weeks.

“The RIF [reduction in force] actions to employees will begin on March 13’th. There is a planned 8% reduction across the company,” an anonymous poster wrote at TheLayoff.

“Raleigh, Santa Clara and Fort Lauderdale will be hit the hardest in that order.”

Rumors were forwarded to WRAL and WRAL TechWire about cuts.

“The whole purpose of this layoff is to open additional requisitions to continue to transform Citrix to a cloud company. The October 2017 layoff did not provide sufficient open requisitions to enable the digital transformation of the company to a cloud SaaS company,” the writer added.

“My information is solid and well placed but please post if you have additional information on the March 13’th layoffs.”

CEO talks restructuring

A post at TheLayoff linked to comments recently made by CEO David Henshall in discussing fourth quarter financial results.

“We did go through a fair bit of restructuring over the second half of last year,” Henshall said.

“We’re doing that so that we could effectively rebalance talent and skill sets and other things. And so we’re in the middle of that process, and we’ll continue to execute that over the next couple of quarters. But I’m quite happy with where we are right now. I think the teams are doing an awesome job.”

Earlier in that call, he also talked about the restructuring and its impact.

“So taking a step back and reflecting on the second half of the year, I think we have accomplished a huge amount and positioned the company well for 2018,” he told analysts.

“We executed the restructuring to drive faster cloud transformation. We aligned R&D to deliver integrated solutions. We defined the road map that expands our addressable market by a third, and we presented a multi-year plan that drives increased customer and shareholder value.”

Henshall was named to the CEO job last July, the stated goal being to accelerate development of Citrix as a cloud company.