Citrix CEO: Partners Key To Meeting IT Challenges
Templeton, speaking to a packed room of solution providers Sunday on the opening day of the Citrix Partner Summit, held in Las Vegas, told partners that those challenges mean opportunities to provide virtualization from application to desktop to the Web.
"Our model is helping customers adopt to business change, helping customers adopt to technical change. And doing it economically," he said.
Citrix this year is holding its Partner Summit on the two days before it kicks off its annual Citrix Synergy end-user conference.
Citrix, which this year is celebrating its 20th anniversary, said reaching that milestone would have been impossible without partners. "We value friendships and relationships," he said. "Call us sappy. But we really value our relationships."
Trends like globalization and regulation or the lack of regulation mean business is changing faster than ever, and not just in terms of the economy, Templeton said.
Unfortunately, today's distributed computing environment, based on servers and individual PCs, is not suitable for businesses to get in shape to meet the quickening pace of change.
"We're going to keep on course to eliminate a lot of these computers with end-to-end virtualization of desktops, applications, networks, servers, and yes, even clients," he said.
Citrix is providing the tools to help solution providers support their customers as they struggle to meet the challenges, Templeton said.
Working with Citrix, they should be able to go to their customers and tell them they can deliver anything they need at half the cost of the competition with virtualization, or deliver the Web experience at five times the speed and with half the infrastructure using Citrix's NetScaler Web appliances, or deliver a rich desktop PC experience on any device, Templeton said.
"We're going to provide you the tools you need to deliver it all," he said.
Citrix wants to be the ideal partner for solution providers looking to provide their customers with this level of virtualization, and said that being the best partner can be defined using four metrics.
The first is to be able to provide great value to customers, which Templeton said can be easily measured by looking at whether a customer is better off after they work with Citrix and the solution provider.
The second is partner profitability, which Templeton said Citrix is providing via current and new products and services and programs.
The third is trust and respect, which Templeton said he hopes his company has earned after 20 years. Most companies that get to Citrix's size "blow up" when it comes to partners. "We trust and respect you," he said.
The fourth, and most important metric, is vision and leadership. "You can have all these other things, and have a nice party together for a while," he said. "But real vision and leadership is needed to make it happen over time."
The primary battle being fought today in data centers is the consumerization of IT vs. the inertia of dead issues, Templeton said.
Inertia is hard to overcome because it is one of the most powerful ideas in the world, leading to locked-in, proprietary systems.
The consumerization of IT is coming from a new crop of companies that started in the consumer space but which are more and more impacting enterprises, Templeton said.
He cited companies like Amazon, which can provide storage capacity at 15 cents per Gbyte per month compared to the traditional data center which pays $4 per Gbyte per month, or Google, where one administrator can manage 20,000 servers compared to the 100 servers per administrator.