Citrix hires staff, cuts prices in SMB assault

Software vendor Citrix has hired a channel sales team and set promotional pricing to take its virtual desktop application to the SMB.

On 1 January the vendor began putting together its SMB team, which is led by Nick Hoskins (pictured), manager, SMB for Australia and New Zealand. He leads a staff of four territory managers and together they have raised SMB sales by 5 percent in the first quarter.

"It's not a lot but it's more than it's normally been," said Peter Brockhoff, area vice president for Australia and New Zealand.

Brockhoff said Citrix had invested heavily in selling its virtual desktop software Xen Desktop to the enterprise for the past three years, "and that's been great".

This year SMB would be a major focus, said Brockhoff.

Citrix is running three promotions designed to increase desktop virtualisation sales.

A trade-up program running until June 30 lets XenApp customers upgrade to XenDesktop 4 and save up to 80 percent off the full price. XenApp customers can trade up their licences now without affecting delivery of their on-demand applications and add virtual desktops as needed.

A customer that trades up all XenApp licences receives two XenDesktop licence for every XenApp licence.

The program, which was a "low-risk" way for resellers to try virtual desktops, was driving a lot of sales, said Brockhoff.

The XenDesktop Advisor Rewards Program, which runs until December 31, gives certain Citrix resellers a 100 percent bonus on top of the standard Citrix Advisor Rewards payment for sales of XenDesktop Enterprise and Platinum editions.

And Citrix is running a 20 percent discount on sales of five or more of its branch repeaters.

Roadshow

Citrix has run a roadshow for SMB customers through capital cities in Australia called "Year of the virtual desktop", which drew slightly larger than expected audiences.

"Windows 7 is a huge driver at the moment," said Brockhoff. Customers wanting to migrate operating systems have come to resellers and vendors asking for a better way to handle the transition.

"The key driver is rapid adoption of the new platform. In the past companies would go to every single desktop and do manual rebuilds of the operating system," said Hoskins. "Virtual desktop delivers in a fraction of the time and cost."

While enterprise bought virtual desktop software for security and offshore contracting, the technology was now being used for mobile workforces and branch offices, said Brockhoff. "Now it's building out the next phase."

Another indicator of interest in virtual desktops was the number of partners who had decided to go to Citrix's global partner conference in the US, said Brockhoff. About 18 staff from 11 companies were flying to San Francisco for the event.

Integrator Dimension Data is sending several staff from Australia, including Peter Menadue, group general manager of Microsoft solutions.

Sales of virtual desktop software were up 20 to 30 percent this year, said Menadue, many on the back of Windows 7 migrations.

"Everybody has talked about refreshing their XP fleet. They're saying, 'I don't want to do it like I did 10 years ago. How can I do it differently?'

"Nearly every discussion we have with customers about desktop involves virtual desktop in some way and that indicates it's gonig to be a breakout year for virtual desktop," he said.

Hoskins previously worked as a Citrix corporate sales rep for five years. He still spent a lot of time with customers, giving Citrix resellers on the job training in the virtual desktop software, he said.

Selling to SMB, which Citrix defines as 250 to 1000 seats, was "different" as the sales cycles were shorter and less people were involved in the decision.

"The people we are selling to are very multi-skilled. Let's say you've got an IT manager that looks after the infrastructure and network as well. He's going to rely more on the partner for IP and guidance and direction," said Hoskins.

Citrix resellers sell desktop virtualisation through six models, depending on the customer's requirements.

Application virtualisation was the most popular model followed by a hosted, published desktop. Common virtualised applications were internet access, Microsoft Office and line of business applications.

The hosted, published destkop was the most locked down and scalable approach, said Brockhoff.

One strong market for that model has been manufacturing, where task-oriented workers only needed to interact with two or three applications.

"You can get a lot of users per server - virtual or physical - with that model," said Brockhoff.