At Citrix Field Kickoff 2021, we announced Citrix Partner Success — a new vision and strategy for the evolution and growth of our partner ecosystem. This is the second blog post in a two-part series (read part one here). In today’s installment, we’ll continue previewing what we have planned and show you how to ensure your voice is heard as we design for the future.

Partnering Is Our Competitive Advantage

Partners are the most instrumental part of our value chain and our connectedness with customers. As customers accelerate to the cloud, the role of partners becomes increasingly important as customers expect more, with less, faster.

Citrix has a long and rich 30-year tradition of partnering. Partners have been instrumental to our success in winning more than 400,000 customers and supporting millions and millions of users. Citrix Partner Success is designed to ensure we build from this tradition while also embracing the seismic upheaval happening in the technology marketplace.

As I mentioned in the last installment, 2020 exposed pressure points where improvements were needed. In analyzing the case for change, we landed on four core overwhelming business needs:

  • Increased agility around cloud consumption and usage
  • A single set of branding, tooling, tracking, and support that unifies the partner experience
  • Updated business models
  • More focus on business outcomes

Perform While We Transform

As it became clear that the time was now to make a generational shift in our programs approach, we also wanted to avoid a single monolithic change that would burden partners or disrupt their day-to-day activities.

In the past, technology vendors could spend two to five years reconstructing their partner programs and initiatives into a single point-in-time monolithic program update. Often these big program drops have been cumbersome and primarily advantageous to the vendor. They required a lot of re-registration and process changes, often resulting in partners working more on the program instead of focusing on the customer.

For the last several months, through more than 50 interviews, we’ve been benchmarking with technology vendors from around the globe as well as industry experts and analysts. The overarching recommendation from vendors and analysts is that partner programs need to be easier, more agile, consistent, and show a clear path to partner profitability.

This is why we chose to announce Citrix Partner Success as a framework and a strategy. We envision Citrix Partner Success more like a SaaS product with monthly updates and improvements with constant two-way communication and check points. Our goal is to work together with you to ensure we build the world’s best partnering program that allows us both to Perform today, while we transform for tomorrow.

At Citrix Field Kickoff 2021, we announced some near-term resources and tools that we believe can accelerate our shared customer’s journey to the cloud, including:

What’s Next

In the future, we will be talking about a bunch of cool stuff, and I am looking for partners to interview. If you are interested in participating, please ping me directly. These are just a sample of the topics on the horizon:

  • Customer and Partner Experience
  • Accelerating your Citrix Cloud Practice and Productizing Your Services
  • Citrix Partner Economy
  • Emerging and blending of Business Models
  • Wrike (stoked for this one!)

Thank you for your partnership! If you have feedback or questions, please drop them in the comments below.


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