5 Major Citrix Partner Program Changes In 2022

A departing channel chief. Reorganizing partner account managers. Rethinking incentives and new auto-approvals for partners.

These are just some of the changes to hit the channel partner program of virtualization and cloud vendor Citrix, whose next chapter as a company crosses a milestone April 21 with a shareholder vote to approve plans to take the company private and merge it with data analytics vendor Tibco.

In a recent interview with CRN, Hector Lima, Citrix’s executive vice president and chief customer officer, discussed five areas of change for partners of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based vendor.

[RELATED: Citrix’s Hector Lima On How Partners’ Voices Will Be ‘Amplified’ With Channel Program Revamp ]

The changes come after Citrix leaders – including interim President and CEO Bob Calderoni – acknowledged “missteps” in go-to-market and how channel partners are rewarded.

Although Citrix partners will notice some changes right away, Lima said the changes put the company in a better position for next year.

“This is a big, established business for us. And anytime that we’re going to make any strategic changes, it takes time. So I’m really doing this now because I want to hit the ground running come 2023, but definitely we’ll see things start to change this year.“

It appears that the channel will continue to be an important part of how Citrix does business. In February, a high level source close to the deal told CRN that improving Citrix’s channel execution is part of the plan for Citrix’s future.

And participate in upward of 70 percent of Citrix’s business, Lima told CRN.

And for partners, Citrix remains a top contender in the field of Desktop as a Service, cloud and virtualization, he said. And partners of the biggest cloud vendors—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google—should look at Citrix for a way to add to their offerings.

“Those partners that really grow and scale their business are those that find logical adjacencies to our technology,” Lima said. “So many of them say, ‘Look, not only do I make money on selling Citrix solutions and then managing those solutions, but there are these other logical technologies that I can add around them that allow me to increase that wallet share with that customer.’ That’s what you typically see with those best partners that are maximizing returns for themselves.”

He continued: “Customers tell me all the time that Citrix is a pull technology for them. Once they have that as one of their beachheads, it pulls a lot of other solutions that they can bring to the table to their customers, and that’s really what they look for as they try to round out the portfolio products.”

Here are the major Citrix partner program changes so far you need to know about.