Citrix sheds 40 resellers, citing poor returns

Software vendor Citrix has been shaking up its channel, culling 20 percent of its 200 Australia-based partners and introducing a raft of other changes.

Michael McGrath, channel manager at Citrix in Australia, said the company had shed 20 percent of its 200 Australian partners from its Access Partner program.

McGrath said the culled resellers had not been earning Citrix the revenue that it required. Some 95 percent of its sales are via indirect channels, he said.

Citrix was also seeking to add partners 'every month', he said, but the new partners were likely to come on board as 'value-adds' rather than replacements for the departing resellers.

'We are constantly reviewing our channel program and at the end of last year, we re-structured internally to ensure we had a much stronger focus on working with the channel,' McGrath said. 'We now have a different team focus ... on some of our new products and re-integrating the partners that have shown potential.'

He said Citrix wanted to alter its channel strategy to ensure that the partners which 'really deserved' assistance would get the fairest possible share of the pie.

Its year-old 'Influencers' program would this year offer five percent commissions for influencing customer purchases 'significantly' instead of three percent. Also, resellers would not need to sell as much Citrix software to qualify for the rebate, McGrath said.

This was an 'innovative' move for Citrix, he said.

Citrix sales had been 'excellent' in Australia. 'We are experiencing a very strong first quarter. It's always good to get out of the blocks well. We're starting to get a lot of traction for our new products,' McGrath said.

He said the company had high hopes for its Metaframe Access suite, which runs on Windows and Unix servers, in particular. Citrix was bundling new software in that suite, he said.

Meanwhile, the software vendor was launching a free 'seminar in a box' package to help resellers tailor their own product seminars to deliver to end-users.

The package includes diskettes, presentations, product information and would be updated continually, he said.

The offering would be costly to Citrix but the company believed investing in the channel would be worth the effort, McGrath said.