Citrix partner boss on why the channel will move away from solutions-based sales
Director of Northern Europe reveals where partners should focus their efforts to win big
The channel is heading towards a "person-centred" model where partners will see demand from customers for a user-focused experience, according to Citrix's director for Northern Europe.
Justin Sutton-Parker told CRN that this year will see the channel move away from a solution-based presence to helping customers increase their employees' productivity.
"This demand generation that partners will be going through is more about the user experience," he explained.
"It went from a solutions-based presence - ‘we can do this, you can do this', [and it's now] putting the person right in the centre of the experience and asking ‘Am I making life for the employee as easy as I can?'
"We'll see partners doing more work, events and marketing around putting the user at the centre of the experience so they can choose to work easily. I think that's where the channel is going this year."
Using the vendor's Workspace microapp as an example of a user-focused tool, Sutton-Parker explained that the app enables him to significantly cut the amount of time he would previously spend on one task, allowing him to be more productive either by funnelling that time back into the company or by using it to get a better work-life balance, which would prevent burnout.
"What's the value of an hour? If you're giving time back to people, that can be time back to companies - you increase productivity, speed to market, all those great things," he said.
"If you're making people more productive, they can choose what they do with that extra bit of free time that might come out of it; they might want to be more productive or they might want to mix it up with their work-life balance."
This trend is something that other vendors such as Citrix partner Microsoft have pre-empted with the launch of its Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) desktop-as-a-service offering last year. The service allows users to deploy and scale their Windows desktops and apps on Azure, negating the need to store apps and data on machines.
Sutton-Parker called this an "awesome" move from Microsoft that taps into this demand from customers for intuitive and instant technology that spans devices and software.
"People will want things that just operate on everything," he stated.
"Microsoft, for example, brought out WVD, which is a great idea. If the biggest company in software in that space is talking about virtual desktops, that's awesome because they're saying it's the best way to go.
"People are going into the cloud, getting their services from the cloud - that's where the change will be. So for the channel [an emerging tend] is being prepared for that cloud transformation."