Citrix sends A/NZ partners back to school

Application delivery vendor Citrix Systems has developed a program to provide partners with additional training and sales tools.

The Citrix Partner Accelerator Program has been launched across the Pacific region and will involve more than 1,200 channel partner staff from India, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Australia and China.

Furthermore, more than 110 channel partners from Australia and New Zealand attended a two-day event at Sydney's Darling Harbour on the 13 and 14 March.

Dean Vaughan, channel development manager for Australia and New Zealand at Citrix, told CRN that Citrix’s users and applications have expanded into new areas, with more web-based applications and new desktop server technology.

“We have made a tremendous amount of acquisitions which has moved us into new areas. We felt we needed to educate partners on how to articulate these new technologies,” he said.

Last month Citrix acquired the assets of Sydney-based Aurema, a provider of processor workload monitoring and management software.

“The 110 partners which attend the Sydney event is a significant proportion of our partner base in A/NZ,” said Vaughan. “The reaction from our partners has been amazing as they appreciate the amount of investment we make into partners in terms of development and education.”

Vaughan said Citrix’s partners really embraced the event due to its interactive nature.

“We broke partners into different tutorial groups and into further sub-groups so there was a close touch between people,” added Vaughan.

Wesley Allen, director of channel for Pacific at Citrix, said: “We developed the Citrix Partner Accelerator to address the needs of our growing channel partner network."

Allen said Citrix’s channel partners are already among the industry’s best at identifying customer pain-points experienced through globalisation, regulation, disruption, consolidation and expectations of younger, technology savvy staff entering their companies.

“This program will help partners better deliver a winning combination of their own services and Citrix application delivery infrastructure, thereby enabling end-user customers to overcome their challenges,” added Allen.