As businesses of all kinds make the move to cloud, demand is surging like never before for Citrix Cloud solutions on Microsoft Azure. That’s why I’m especially excited for this year’s Microsoft Inspire event in Las Vegas from July 15 – 19. As Senior Director of Microsoft Business Development for Citrix, it’s my job to make sure that joint Citrix-Microsoft customers are getting what they need from our partnership. And recently, we’re seeing huge demand for these deals which is why I need Microsoft partners to join the cause—and build their business and their revenue along the way.

Why should you add a Citrix partnership to your Microsoft partnership? I’ve got plenty of compelling reasons, but you don’t have to just take my word for it – many of our current partners are seeing the benefits of both partnerships, as well.

The strong Microsoft-Citrix partnership is even stronger in the cloud

It’s an understatement to say our two companies have a successful relationship. Citrix and Microsoft have been partners for 30 years—a stunning track record in this business. We’ve got more than 400,000 joint customers encompassing tens of millions of users. Together we level the playing field, turning industry disruptors into advantages for our companies and our customers.

Now we’ve extended our partnership to the cloud for a new era of joint success. All Citrix solutions have an Azure deployment capability, and all Citrix workloads deployed in Azure run in the customer’s tenant. Customers who deploy Citrix solutions in Azure can count on a first and best experience, making this a winning combination all around.

Citrix Cloud customers want Azure

Today, Citrix is riding a powerful wave of digital workspace adoption across the industry. Customers recognize that employees now need to be able to get work done from anywhere at any time, using any device. The cloud is the perfect way to meet that need. With Citrix Cloud, you can deliver a complete workspace for easy access to virtual apps, desktops, SaaS apps, web apps, mobile apps, and content—everything people need, wherever and however they need it.

But the flexibility doesn’t end there. While we’ve always offered Citrix workloads in Azure Government Cloud, we announced at Synergy this year that the Citrix Cloud backplane is now available in Azure Government Cloud, allowing partners who call on large government customers access to this opportunity as well.

And customers have money to spend. According to AMI, the Workspace as a Service market will reach $9.41B in 2019. That’s a lot of deals to cover.

We’re better together

Matthew Metelsky (@telsky) is the CTO of Third Octet (@thirdoctet), the Citrix Canadian Partner of the Year for 2017. Here’s what he’s seeing in the market. “When we’re looking at the Citrix partnership in our discussions, nine times out of ten, Microsoft comes up as well. The Citrix alignment with Microsoft is very positive, driving a lot of momentum in our organizations. That synergy works well for us. So understanding the strengths of Microsoft, understanding the strengths of Citrix, and being able to put those two together easily—the clients really understand that.”

Rob Mattlin, national practice manager for the modern workspace for Thomas Duryea Logicalis (@TDLogicalis), echoes that view. “Citrix has been helping to deliver Microsoft capability on Microsoft devices for decades, so coupling these cloud solutions together to create simplicity for our clients made perfect sense. At TDL, we have built a practice specifically around delivering a positive end user experience, and Citrix and Microsoft are core to making this a reality for our partners. When we have conversations with our clients, the messaging between Microsoft and Citrix is so well aligned that articulating the benefits is made that much easier.”

It’s a great way to solve problems for customers
Leveraging the Microsoft-Citrix partnership is a natural and seamless way to expand the business value you deliver. Citrix Cloud on Azure gives organizations flexibility and choice in the way they empower their workforce, with security and privacy built right into Azure. You can help your customers:

  • Cut IT costs across the board
  • Give their IT people some breathing room
  • Deliver flexible IT solutions that can grow with their business
  • Respond nimbly to changing business conditions

Jason Webster, director of cloud-managed services for four-time gold Microsoft partner eGroup (@eGroup_Inc,) puts it this way: “Citrix Cloud delivers simplicity and choice while solving a critical need for clients. With the flexibility to securely deploy desktops and applications anywhere, Citrix helps clients with their cloud migrations. Microsoft and Citrix teams have a tight alignment and clear complementary value propositions. It’s been simple for us to connect the value of our services to the value that Microsoft and Citrix sales teams deliver.”

As hybrid cloud becomes the new de facto norm, Citrix Cloud on Azure gives companies a simple, manageable way to operationalize the right architecture for their needs. Jason adds, “Citrix allows freedom and choice for where workloads run, whether it be on premises, in middle tier clouds, or in the public cloud, and the ability to manage and orchestrate that all through a single pane of glass. So just as we see Azure as a great choice for cloud, Citrix introduces simplicity, security, and great results for the end users accessing the system, so that they can focus on their business, not necessarily their IT.”

Mergers and acquisitions have been a key driver for Ray Jaksic (@RayJaksic,) CTO of Coretek Services (@Coretek). “Companies in general, especially manufacturers, are becoming much more global, and merged companies with disparate engineering departments all over the world need to be able to work together. We see a lot of use cases where organizations have high-end graphical needs with large files, or they’ve merged a lot of different organizations, and they need a fast way to standardize and give access to corporate resources all over the globe. These use cases lend themselves very well to Citrix on Azure because in Azure we don’t have to worry about where their data centers are, get into those resources, or procure equipment. We can stand things up very quickly and make them accessible around the globe. From the Azure perspective, Citrix helps us make things very secure globally, and offer companies the ability to protect that data, keep it in a centralized environment, and control what users can do with it.”

Brasoftware (@Brasoftware) simplified workspace delivery for a leading transportation company in Brazil. Says Leonardo Nascimento, the company’s manager of virtualization products, “They had an on-premises Citrix XenDesktop deployment. When the opportunity to update it came about, we offered Citrix Cloud with Azure. This gave them better solution availability, which made their daily routine a lot easier. The deal was the result of this strategy of combining both solutions and delivering the entire solution to the client instead of only a specific product. Brasoftware has very good synergy with Azure, so there’s already good penetration, which makes it easier. We also have the Citrix Cloud driver so it was a combination of both technologies. In the past two years, we’ve gotten a lot closer to the Citrix Brazil team and Brasoftware has become of more significance for Citrix, and Citrix has become of enormous significance for Brasoftware’s business.”

Third Octet enabled full digital transformation for a service provider supporting Fortune 100 retail organizations. Previously, the company provided deployment, lifecycle management, and support for applications running on its clients’ own infrastructure—a legacy distributed model that was difficult to support and manage. The company turned to Third Octet for help transitioning to a Software as a Service model. This helped the company better meet the needs of its customers—and helped it strengthen its own business agility and performance. “I don’t think digital transformation does it justice,” says Matthew Metelsky. “This was an experience that we created literally on a conference call over a couple of hours, and then a quick spin-up of Citrix on Azure that really reinvented this business. They went from being difficult to scale and difficult to predict to locked-in recurring revenue as a profitable, highly centralized entity who can turn on a dime.”

It’s good for your Microsoft quotas, too

I started with a dollars-and-cents benefit, so I’ll close with one too. I’ll let Rob Mattlin from Thomas Duryea Logicalis make the point for me: “As a big Microsoft partner and a Citrix partner, anything we can do to get incentives through Citrix and Citrix Cloud that helps us retire our Azure quota is hugely beneficial. We can go out to the client with a really cohesive solution and story, and in essence kill two birds with one stone, by selling the Citrix cloud story. And off the back of that, we can help retire our Azure quota as well.”

See the Magic of the Citrix and Microsoft Partnerships in Action

Through the power of the Citrix and Microsoft alliance, Third Octet found the right solution for their customer, Rosenburg. Watch their story come to life, and how a newfound business agility saved them 65 percent of their Microsoft Azure consumption costs.

Partnering to Win: Creating Agility with Citrix Cloud and Microsoft Azure (video)


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