Opportunities ahead in the channel

Citrix has grown solidly in recent years after focusing on growing organically through acquisitions and bringing products such as XenSource and NetScaler into its fold. Looking to the future, the vendor wants to make sure it stays focused on new technologies and educates resellers to enable them to enjoy the benefits of the company’s growth. Resellers ready to make the shift to application delivery from deployment are in a good position to work with Citrix and if they have a strong networking or comms background or a customer base that spans a large geographical area, this could represent a great opportunity.

CRN: What benefits are there in working with Citrix in regards
to applications?

Vaughan: From a reseller point of view it makes sense to expand across all of the six solutions [offered by Citrix]. It makes sense because of return of investment and product differentiation inside customers that are already running Citrix products.

It’s our absolute directive to integrate our products in and amongst each of the technologies. Already with access gateway you can see that we are importing software over to the NetScaler appliance and access gateway is leveraging Presentation Server. You are also seeing now how our WANScaler product is accessing Citrix Access Gateway.

From a reseller’s perspective it is about return on investment. You get trained in one product, you get trained across our other technologies and our other products. Secondly, when you are a reseller and you have the Citrix WANScaler solution and you are going up against a competitor or another way of delivering the same level of service, it becomes very clear to the customer what the best solution is.

We are the number-one selling SSLVPN and we have the market share. There is nobody else that really competes against Presentation Server so in light of that if they are running our presentation server or our SSLVPN it just makes sense to put in the WANScaler solution because it is leveraging technologies that are already built into WANScaler and Presentation Server that other products.

CRN: What type of resellers are you looking for in regards to application delivery?

Vaughan: The resellers that we think are ideal for this technology are resellers that have strong comms backgrounds. We have a very solid channel and the channel has come from the traditional presentation server virtualisation space. We are working with our partners that have solid and strong networking and comms business. We are also working with partners that span national and particularly geographical areas because of the nature of the distance issue with the product and being able to support customers in remote locations.

We have two initiatives in place. We are working with those resellers that already have comms experience and we are working with resellers in the virtualisation space that are moving across to application networking.

CRN: How does Citrix differentiate themselves from the competition?

Vaughan: The thing about application networking is that it is no longer just a requirement to put bigger pipes into the network. What Citrix is doing to differentiate itself is to say “hey there’s a smarter way to do this. Let’s look at what the application is doing over the network and look at what we can do with that application and how it can be delivered to better enable that delivery to the customer verses just throwing more infrastructure at the solution”. It all goes back to resellers asking customers “what are your web-based applications doing over the network? What are your Windows-based applications doing over the network and how can you better manage them over the network?”

Moving into the appliance market for Citrix means that our Citrix partners can enhance their service delivery and their managed services, their break-fix maintenance and the support that they are offering. This is because they are now offering hardware-based support services with their solutions over and above their traditional licensing revenue and additional services revenue.

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