Citrix eyes fivefold boost in local Kaviza market

Citrix has recruited five Australian customers to a pilot program designed to attract more channel partners to its recently acquired VDI-in-a-box virtual appliance.

According to Citrix A/NZ channel director Neville James, there are 20 to 30 VDI-in-a-box deployments in Australia currently.

The company hopes to train 20 of its channel partners to service between 100 and 250 VDI-in-a-box customers by the end of the year.

James pinned the slow Australian takeup of VDI-in-a-box on a meagre Australian sales strategy of its developer, Kaviza.

Citrix acquired Kaviza last May, bringing the SMB-focused virtual appliance to Australia and rebranding it late last year. Prior to the acquisition, Kaviza was a rival of Citrix's XenDesktop.

“The Kaviza business in Australia really hadn’t gotten off the ground by the time Citrix bought it globally,” he said, declining to name specific customers.

For the pilot program, Citrix is leaning on a handful of existing partners for the process, including service provider Regal IT.

“We want to start feeding [the product] into the channel and get them understanding how easy it is to deploy, the skills you need and the time it takes to make the solution functional to customers,” James said.

“What we learn out of the pilot process will factor heavily in how we educate the broader channel.”

James described it as a "fairly conservative approach".

“We’re not planning on looking for a new channel, we’ll probably focus on existing silver partners in the A/NZ marketplace," he said.

"They give us a fairly broad coverage of the SMB marketplace, so it’s more a case of enabling ones we’ve got, adding VDI-in-a-box to those that sell [XenDesktop] and XenApp."

In March, Citrix plans to introduce a VDI-in-a-box bundled package that James said would include Microsoft licenses and servers.

VDI-in-a-box suffered a glitch on New Year’s Day which prevented users from accessing their virtual desktop environments.

Customers received an error message stating ‘no licenses were available’ due to a bug which deemed all licenses for the software expired. 

The company said only three Australian customers were affected. A fix was issued two days later.

James told CRN he did not expect the glitch to affect Citrix’s partner recruitment drive. 

“The problem was identified in the US and rectified within a couple of days,” he said. “We wrote a particular piece of code to fix it and it worked perfectly well.”