Citrix to lavish TLC on 30 developing partners

SDG and Arrow ECS help vendor draw up list of promising partners that warrant deeper level of engagement

Citrix will "stand shoulder to shoulder" with its distributors to replicate the support enjoyed by its managed partners for another 30 developing partners.

The vendor directly manages about 25 UK partners including Computacenter, SCC, Kelway, Point to Point, Intercept and Centralis. These partners enjoy access to quarterly executive clubs and technical roundtables.

However, this kind of support will now be rolled out to another 30 partners who work through distribution. Citrix has also assigned a dedicated account manager to help SDG and Arrow ECS, which are drawing up the list of candidates.

Kevin Bland, channel partner sales director at Citrix, said many of these partners are "on the sidelines but ready to commit".

"Partners are saying we need dialogue with someone from Citrix," he said. "We need to get out there and show these partners some respect and that we are listening, learning and are supportive."

He added: "We have told the distributors they need to pick the partners they really want to focus on and want us to focus on – and they have come up with some absolute gems."

Citrix recently parted company with distributor Computerlinks but Bland said there are no plans to tinker with the line-up.

"We continue to have dialogue with various distributors to ensure we are covering all the angles and that we are swimming in the right-size pond," he said. "But we have absolutely no plans to expand from two."

However, Bland did question what role traditional IT distributors will play in the provision of cloud services to Citrix's partner community.

"I am not sure where the current IT distributors are going to get it from," he said. "There are a lot of organisations out there which are Rackspace-like, where their core business is hosting and services and they understand the security issues and have taken the risk and made the upfront investment. I think a lot of the distributors will be challenged by cloud distributors."