Citrix boosts partner reward programs

Citrix is set to undertake a major revamp of its channel program. The make-over focuses on two areas, first in enhancements to its advisor reward program, and second in a new cloud registration program.

The new channel incentives go live today, said Phil Dean Jones, Citrix Asia Pacific senior director for channel sales and partner development.

“This is the first phase of a project we have been working on for some time,” he told CRN. “It is being  rolled out around the world and is aimed at increasing the profit line for our partners.”

The new programs were welcomed by Rhys Evans, national practice manager for service provider Thomas Duryea.

“For us it’s a fantastic change, with these programs focusing on the platform partners,” said Evans. “We’ve invested in Citrix for a long period and this increases our front end differentiation.”

Citrix represents around a quarter of Thomas Duryea’s business, Evans said.

The advisor reward program revamps bring new life to a program that has been running for a number of years, said Citrix’ Dean Jones. For large partners, he said the program will focus on rewarding them for value selling, and will provide adequate compensation  for value selling and for the technical and sales efforts in developing customer relationships.

“This is all about recognising them with a rebate after the sale is done,” he said.

One interesting wrinkle in the program is the fact channel partners are still rewarded – even if they don’t make the sale.

“The partner will get compensated whether they win the deal or not. If someone offers the product they were pitching at a lower margin, they will still get up to ten percent,” Dean Jones said.

The rebates are indexed to the partner’s sales level with Citrix. At present, the company has three partner levels – platinum, gold or silver.

“Platinum gets higher rebates that are beefed up and are consistent to high levels of discount,” he said. “That’s so there’s no disadvantage to doing big deals.”

The platinum program is by invitation only, and is confined to either large multi-site partners, or those with very large single-site installations.

Citrix has around 220 partners across Australia, with platinum partners representing around five percent of that total. Ten percent are gold partners, and the remaining partners, with turn-overs of approximately $50,000 or less, are silver partners.