Brian McColm (Citrix)
Many partners have also been selling virtualisation to the same customer bases for a long time but there is an opportunity to extend into new markets and drive cloud adoption, McColm said.
The addressable market for Citrix partners has shifted and grown from simply virtualisation to embrace the delivery of intelligent digital workspaces including hybrid cloud and SaaS-based applications.
"It's also about the experience side of things for people now," McColm said. "Employee experience is one of the things we are focusing on in terms of the digital workspace."
Citrix is aiming to deliver a more consumer-like, intelligent and at the same time a more secure experience.
Delivering that improved employee experience presents a significant opportunity for partners and is a large part of what digital transformation is all about.
McColm said Citrix's digital workspaces embrace not just applications but desktops and files as well and that is helping the company to grow and become even more relevant today than in the past.
In-built analytics can also deliver customised experiences, performance and rules-based security depending on, for instance, where the user is working from and what they are doing.
That combination, and the opportunity to link the digital workspace with Citrix's networking technology, is what can also translate into higher profitability for channel partners.
"We are basically raising the stakes," McColm said. "If I said to you that 15 per cent of a company's workload is typically through virtualisation that leaves 85 per cent of SaaS based or other apps that you can add value to from a partner perspective.
"Whether they are SaaS-based, web based or virtualisation, they all sit within the workspace."
After what could be seen as a slow start, cloud subscriptions are being deployed rapidly and accounted for around 70 per cent of Citrix's business last year.
"That's quite a rapid movement in a fairly short period of time," McColm said.
For its part, Citrix is investing in customer success managers and providing partners with best practice and to expand into new use-cases.
"We're helping on developing service capabilities, helping them drive adoption, helping them in terms of accelerating customer adoption of the cloud.
"If you do that you are selling to IT and the business. It's not just an IT conversation."
Partners therefore have four broad opportunities: to sell what they are doing today, to sell more to existing customers, to sell new technologies and services to existing customers and sell to new customers and new markets.
"There's a lot of work from the partner account managers focusing on partners on those four priorities from a channel perspective: to differentiate offerings, develop service capabilities for cloud adoption, accelerate customers to the cloud and increase reach to market."
In Australia NTT, Data3 are significant partners as well as large global systems integrators such as Fujitsu and DXC.
In New Zealand, partners come from both the end user computing area -- often Microsoft partners -- and some from a networking perspective.
Spark is a major partner as are Datacom, Fujitsu, Auckland-based platinum partner Deptive and Christchurch's Inde.
McColm said Citrix also works closely with Microsoft, AWS and Google and wants to do more with "born in the cloud" type partners.
