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Citrix hands partners options to meet customer demands
Firm rolls out single subscription covering several services that will make life easier for the channel and users
Citrix has heralded software subscription changes as a boon for its channel partners, providing them with more options to put in front of customers.
The firm, part of the Cloud Software Group, has combined its desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offerings in a Citrix Universal subscription.
The benefit for partners will be a single subscription to put in front of customers that covers a range of services, with Citrix looking to use the platform approach with plans to add further capabilities as fresh services are launched.
Ethan Fitzsimmons, head of global channels and alliances at Cloud Software Group, said the aim was to make sure partners could react to the changing needs of customers.
“The partner benefit is being able to meet their customers where they want to be met,” he said. “It provides partners with the flexibility to address customer needs no matter their chosen cloud strategy or where they are on their respective cloud timeline.
“By more aptly meeting these needs, partners will be able to provide greater customer value, shorten their own sales cycles and provide a shorter path to ROI for both themselves and their customers.”
Citrix has been building a platform that can provide zero-trust and desktop access, including DaaS and VDI, and cater to customers that are operating in a hybrid world. The firm has deepened its ties with Microsoft to provide support for Teams and 365 and ensure it can support a large number of customers.
Managing workloads
Citrix Universal subscription allows partners to provide customers with options to deploy and manage application and desktop workloads both on-premise and in the cloud.
“Many of our customers prefer the control that on-premise offers, with the scalability and flexibility of hybrid cloud,” said Sridhar Mullapudi, general manager at Citrix. “Our latest services and features meet them where they are on their cloud journeys, benefiting enterprises with a reduced admin burden, improved user experience and enhanced security.”
The adoption of public cloud has continued to rise, but the consensus has settled on the future being a hybrid world, with many customers looking to retain some workloads on-premise.
Shannon Kalvar, research director, IDC, said that most businesses were working with a hybrid infrastructure. “Enterprises have realised that they have to coordinate edge, cloud, datacentre and end-point compute to meet the diverse requirements imposed by digital operations using hybrid workforces in the modern world,” she said.
Hybrid environments
There is also an opportunity for the channel to help customers manage their hybrid environments, with research shared by Cisco AppDynamics earlier this week shining a light on the struggles users are facing.
The firm shared findings from its Age of application observability report, which revealed many IT staff are struggling, using inapposite tools and feeling frustrated about their inability to keep on top of apps and workloads.
Ronak Desai, senior vice-president and general manager at Cisco AppDynamics and Full-Stack Observability, said that its research underlined the need for the right hybrid tools.
“Rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies is bringing overwhelming volumes of metrics, events, logs and traces data into the IT department, which traditional monitoring tools just aren’t designed to handle,” he said. “In fact, 78% of technologists state that the increased volume of data from hybrid environments is making manual monitoring impossible.”
