Michael Murphy.
As the country manager for Citrix Systems in Canada, the challenge for Michael Murphy is to catch Canadian customers up with the new technologies the vendor is bringing to market. “We continue to be out ahead of our customers, and even more so in Canada,” Murphy told CDN.
To help capitalize on the opportunity, Citrix will be vying for partner mindshare. It wants top partners to identify customer needs and pitch solutions across Citrix’s product portfolio. Top program tiers will no longer be invitation-only, and will be country-based instead of regional. Citrix sees services as an underserviced opportunity, and wants to build capacity with more differentiated partner tiers.
In Canada, that means original platinum partners IT Weapons and Gibraltar Solutions are now competing with Bell Canada, Compugen and Softchoice, which has meant changes in the go-to-market movement for the two legacy Citrix partners.
Citrix is also enabling partners with a new partner programs to help partners get competitive in the cloud, and new partner certifications targeting XenDesktop 7 skills to align with key trends around mobile, cloud, collaboration and virtualization.