Raghuram Krishnan, Director – Partner, Citrix India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2020
What have been the key highlights of 2019 and how 2020 will be an important year for the IT channel industry?
The year 2019 has been a defining year for the IT channel industry as well as for us. Along with a rise in the total addressable market, we also saw some great opportunities come in from channel partners. Digital transformation has further accelerated rapidly over the past year; and 2020 is going to be an equally challenging, yet a trend-setting year for the industry. Further into this year and in the current circumstance, enterprises will be increasingly looking at a few key initiatives like employee productivity, work-from-home and moving to a cloud infrastructure with multiple vendors. Citrix delivers all these technologies with the Digital Workspace offerings.
The solutions that the partners render to their customers around the above solutions will define their value addition in true essence to their customers. The portfolio is changing steadily, making it an incremental year for the partner community to have a strong contribution. One of Citrix’s key takeaways has been the Partner Services Cooperative Offering. We launched it late last year to help partners jointly deliver professional services. This, we strongly believe, will help the partners elevate to a ‘trusted advisor’ position with their customers. We continue to emphasise the need for partners to articulate the message of moving beyond virtualisation with Digital Workspace. This will expand their total addressable market and help in growing their business without compromising on profitability.
What are the top three technology trends that channel community should be focusing on, and why?
We are seeing a number of trends that will have an impact and also support our strategy for 2020. Digitisation has played a key role in shaping up these trends. Earlier, in the digitisation strategy of an organisation, the ‘people’ aspect was not given due importance; with the ongoing situation across the globe, the people aspect has taken precedence over everything else. The current extra-ordinary situation has also made solutions which keep employees productive, securely connected and available irrespective of where they are or what device they use an integral part of a company’s digitisation strategy.
We are also witnessing an evolution in the CIO’s role. The newer responsibilities of a CIO are so much more than just an information officer. This means, that CIOs should be able to enable their enterprises’ transformation journey with the support of solutions that help employees be more productive, give them the freedom to access data and applications from anywhere using any device without compromising on security and thereby help the employees do what they do best. Citrix, with its Digital Workspace solution, envisaged this much earlier and hence today when everyone is trying to hop on to the Digital Workspace bandwagon, I proudly state that we are already riding and leading this bandwagon for almost a year now.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for partners, and where should partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
We continue to focus on the importance of the digital workspace. Our workspace offering would be the primary focus, going forward. We are also encouraging our partners to articulate the message of moving beyond virtualisation with cloud workspace, which was also the central message at Summit 2020. We truly believe that this is a natural evolution of partners’ core practices around application and desktop virtualisation. At Citrix, we are investing in helping partners tell the story and bring that value as a differentiator into the workspace story. We want to help them differentiate their offerings, and we do that by bringing workspace with intelligence to the front. The top three technologies that we want to focus for this year would be digital workspace, networking (ADC and SD-WAN) and analytics.
