Raghuram Krishnan, Director – Partner, Citrix India, shares the company’s channel strategies for 2019
Key highlights 2018 and opportunities for 2019
The year 2018 was a year of establishing our strategy and consolidating to enable rapid growth. We truly believe that 2019 will be the year where Citrix will have the biggest opportunity ever. The meaning of workplace has redefined itself. Workplace is no more restricted to one’s office; workplace is now anywhere, anytime, on any device. This change is primarily being driven by two factors – the advent of millennials and the pace at which digital transformation is accelerating. This is also a cause of concern for the CIOs as they are now looking to provide employees with choice and a great experience while maintaining high levels of security. This has led to the proliferation of SaaS apps, and increasingly complex and expensive hybrid multi-cloud environments. Citrix is uniquely positioned to help customers address this complexity, and our partners have an incredible opportunity to move beyond virtualisation.
Digital transformation cannot be confined to the head office or to the data centre. For digital transformation to be effective in customer premises, real time access to data, information at any time, from anywhere and from any device will be of paramount importance. In my opinion, 2019 will be the year where customers realise the importance of digital transformation being experienced by everyone in their respective organisations irrespective of where they are, which device they use and when they use it. It’s going to be a year of experience, in a secure manner; 2019 will be the best year for Citrix and our partners, and we look forward to working closely with them to change the industry together.
Top tech trends for channel community
The top three trends that will gain/have gained prominence are cloud, analytics and experience. The industry today is sitting on a plethora of data and there is more coming, that can be used to give valuable insights to benefit businesses. Analytics, as a term, is quite large and cannot be confined or restricted to only one type of data. Today, relevant or critical data could come in from any corner, any individual or any machine. Customers have to be prepared to gain and give real time access to data in a secure manner and also make sense of this data.
For analytics to be effective, cloud – especially hybrid cloud – becomes imperative. It gives the required flexibility to the customer to be agile and available without putting any constraints on the experience factor of users.
Now with the availability of analytics and cloud at the core, the next step towards success is making the information available to people anywhere, anytime, without putting restrictions on devices. This provides absolute freedom to the user. But freedom without security and checks could prove to be a huge disaster for organisations. The solutions provided by Citrix offer more choice, experience and security to companies that are increasingly dealing with hybrid multi-clouds. With Citrix Intelligent Workspace, we can serve customers who don’t need virtualisation – this includes 70 per cent of the companies in the market. We can give them the benefits of virtualisation for computing done through SaaS, mobile and web apps. With the acquisition of Sapho, we are now able to provide all our cloud customers with the same functionality that they get with their on-premise solutions.
Having said this, uncoupling and seamlessly securing their multi clouds isn’t as easy as it sounds. Citrix networking solutions give partners the opportunity to deliver more customer value by enabling them to do just that. In short, we can say that, Citrix not only has the solutions that customers need, but is also playing a major role in helping the customers in their digital transformation journey.
Channel directions for partners
At Citrix, we believe that we have the right partners. I am extremely proud of what our partners have accomplished in 2018, but we aren’t done, and I’m excited about what we’ll do together in 2019 – it will be a great year for Citrix and our partners. The opportunities that our partners will experience with us in growing their business are huge, as
mentioned below:
- With Citrix Workspace, we can serve customers who don’t need virtualisation. In other words we have increased our total addressable market with our intelligent workspace offering
- In the past, we have had failed attempts at addressing the SMB market. A market which has significant contributions to the GDP, but has limited access to funds. The SMB customer is perennially in a catch 22 situation where he has to take a tough call between investing money on IT or reinvesting the same in his business (where the RoI is instant and visible). Our CSP strategy clearly comes as a boon to all SMB customers
- There are a lot of small ISVs who would like to be SaaS providers, but their applications are Windows-based and they don’t have a way to take their app into the cloud. Citrix technology and CSP Strategy are making this happen. The growth in that business has been tremendous with the CSP motion, and Microsoft has been a big help in this
- The acquisition of Sapho and its integration with our Workspace offering has now provided all cloud customers with the same functionality as on their on-premises solutions. Our partners now have one less barrier when working with customers that are hesitant to move to the loud, thereby opening more doors and giving our partners an opportunity to enter new accounts and building their customer base while growing profitably.
