Citrix Unveils Professional Services Program
Through the new Citrix Partner Services program, the company aims to build up channel partners' own professional services businesses around the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite, said Randy Jacques, senior director of consulting practice development at Citrix, based here.
While Citrix has long maintained that one of CCS' top objectives is to pass on skills and knowledge to its solution providers, the new program marks "the first big, public, concerted effort" to draw on the group's consultants and engineers for channel education, Jacques said.
"With Partner Services, we will continue to make it more of a partnering attitude between them and us," Jacques said.
Chris Richner, chief technologist at solution provider Integration Technologies, Newport Beach, Calif., said the new services have helped validate and improve the integrator's Citrix services business, which generates about 90 percent of the company's revenue.
"We can't profess to know everything there is to know about Citrix implementations, and we're always looking for ways to give us an edge so that we're better than our competition," he said.
Initially, the Partner Services program includes four components, with plans to add more services over time, Jacques said.
Through Citrix Services Workshops, CCS consultants conduct a day-and-a-half to two-day review of a partner's Citrix services business and make recommendations on how to improve it. The service costs $2,000.
With Citrix Document Review Service, partners can submit best practices documents for infrastructure assessments, designs and proof-of-concept projects around the Citrix products to CCS for validation before turning them over to clients. The service costs between $500 and $1,000 per document.
Citrix Field Workshops will be held quarterly in nine North American cities to provide free technical training on best practices for Citrix implementations.
The final component of the program includes CCS packages around infrastructure assessment and proof of concept services that solution providers can resell.
Partner Services are available now in North America and are slated to be available globally later this year.