Ericom looks to recruit for ongoing Citrix battle
Vendor aims to woo channel partners with its low-cost PowerTerm WebConnect offering
Server-based computing vendor Ericom Software is aiming to double its UK VAR tally as it takes aim at market goliath Citrix.
The vendor claims its PowerTerm WebConnect software is a third of the cost of Citrix, making it ideal for enterprise-wide roll-outs.
Ian Platt, managing director UK and Ireland at Ericom, said the firm would work with its three distributors, Avnet, AppSpeed and Arc Technology, to double its VAR count to 80 in 2007.
“There are lots of Citrix wannabes but no-one is winning deals against Citrix like we are,” Platt said, who claimed Ericom had recently wrested a 2,000-seat contract with insurance giant Swinton from its nemesis.
Platt predicted that many new partners would come from the managed services arena, following the introduction of its software as a service (SaaS) pricing model to the UK.
Prospective partners will gain access to Ericom’s co-op fund, which, at five per cent of sales, currently stands at about £200,000 annually in the UK.
Jon Busfield, sales manager at Ericom platinum partner Network SI, said: “There are always people who will just buy Citrix. But once they’ve tested Ericom they’ll see the product does 90 per cent of what Citrix can do, and the other 10 per cent they’re not bothered about.”
Busfield said Ericom’s monthly payment model would appeal to Microsoft SaaS partners because it matches Microsoft’s Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) programme.
But Richard Jackson, UK and Ireland managing director at Citrix, hit back: “In the last three or four years many firms have come up and taken us on only to disappear almost as quickly. And we’re not seeing any significant ground lost.”
Jackson claimed anyone buying Citrix’s flagship Presentation Server will have covered their costs in nine months.