Citrix and Partners walking hand in hand

Kaushal Veluri
Director – Channels & Alliances
India Subcontinent, Citrix 

Citrix is the cloud computing company that enables mobile workstyles – empowering people to work and collaborate from anywhere, accessing apps and data on any of the latest devices, as easily as they would in their own office – simply and securely. Citrix cloud computing solutions help IT and service providers build both private and public clouds – leveraging virtualization and networking technologies to deliver high-performance, elastic and cost-effective services for mobile workstyles. With market-leading solutions for mobility, desktop virtualization, cloud networking, cloud platforms, collaboration, and data sharing, Citrix helps organizations of all sizes to achieve the kind of speed and agility necessary to succeed in an increasingly mobile and dynamic world. Citrix products are in use at more than 260,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally.  

Key Target Verticals...

“Citrix powers mobile workstyles and cloud services. Primarily, our solutions are industry- agnostic and have proven to add value to organizations across all industry segments. Our customers in India include BPO organizations like Aegis BPO; ITeS organizations like Geometric Software; Manufacturing organizations like Sona Group, Wonder Cement, Perfetti Van Melle and Banking customers like HDFC Bank, Thane Janata Sahakari Bank, Fullerton India Credit Company, Shamrao Vithal Cooperative Bank Ltd, etc. We have seen tremendous growth in our desktop virtualization technology adoption from BPO, ITeS and BFSI segments with a focus on security, manageability and mobility as the key drivers,” says Kaushal Veluri, Director – Channels & Alliances, India Subcontinent, Citrix.

Solution Offerings...

Citrix’s technologies power mobile workstyles and cloud services. On the mobile workstyle front, our solutions enable organizations to embrace Enterprise Mobility helping people to work with other people, data and apps from the latest devices – anywhere; embrace consumerization, empower employees and simplify IT through adoption of Bring-Your-Own-Device; help employees to work productively from any location through work shifting and help organizations to secure confidential business information while maximizing access and collaboration. 

“While on the Cloud Services front, we help organization to build a Unified Storefront for self-service apps and data – SaaS, mobile, web and windows; transform windows desktop and apps into Windows-as-a-Service cloud with Desktop Virtualization; help them build Enterprise Cloud Networks enabling them to create  a service delivery fabric for maximum performance, availability and scale and execute on Cloud Convergence so that they can leverage infinite scale and flexibility across private and public clouds,” opines Kaushal.

Citrix recently launched XenMobile MDM which is a robust mobile device management solution that delivers role-based management, configuration and security for both corporate and employee-owned devices. Upon user device enrolment, IT can provision policies and apps to devices automatically, blacklist or whitelist apps, detect and protect against jail broken devices, and wipe or selectively wipe a device that is lost, stolen or out of compliance. Users can use any device they choose, while IT can ensure compliance of corporate assets and secure corporate content on the device. 

Integrating Distribution Network...

Citrix distribution network is a very significant contributor to its growth story in India. Kaushal says that they have added tremendous value to its ecosystem by helping reach out to a wider range of partners and supporting its customer outreach with sales and technical assistance. A distribution network is not just about processing orders or managing customer and partner credit but also about working with them to manage the wider partner ecosystem and providing the partners the same support that Citrix would. Given that our resources would have limited bandwidth, it is the distribution network that helps Citrix ensure that the partner’s sales and technical needs are fulfilled in time resulting in better satisfaction and growth in business. He adds, “We work with our distributors aligning them to certain partners and ensuring that they provide the requisite support to the partners for all their internal enablement and external customer engagements.” 

Major Partners...

Some of our major partners of Citrix are Wipro, TCS, SK International, PC Solutions, Ricoh India, Orient Technologies, Frontier Business Systems, Veeras Infotek, Futurenet Technologies and many more. 

VAR becoming Premier Partner...

Citrix has three levels of partnerships – Silver, Gold and Platinum. VARs would typically join at the Silver level of partnership committing to a certain certification level and revenue number. Citrix works closely with the partners in terms of sales and technical enablement, sales interlocks and demand generation to help the partners reach out to their customer space and generate business on our technologies. Citrix also involves its distribution resources to assist the partners with the initial solution sales and PoC execution so that the partners can learn on-the-job in active customer engagements. 

“As our interactions increase and the partners gain confidence in our technologies, they gain the capability to generate and close customer engagements independently. We evaluate the partners’ network every year and invite some of our partners to move up the value chain to the Gold level partnership. This would also involve some more commitment from the partner in terms of additional certifications and revenue commitment,” explains Kaushal.

Citrix has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for Application Delivery Controllers. 

moumita@varindia.com