Citrix, this week at the Citrix Summit 2019 event, made a case for partners to embrace intelligent workspaces, which make use of a wide range of emerging technologies to make it simpler for employees to dynamically access a wide range of applications residing on-premises or delivered as a service.
Rather than simply reselling a diverse mix of applications at a relatively low margin, there is a much bigger opportunity to integrate application and services using a “micro apps” running in a dedicated browser that Citrix gained when it acquired Sapho late last year, says Citrix channel chief Craig Stillwell. Those micro apps can be configured to access data residing in any backend cloud service or on-premises environment to create an intelligent workspace.
That approach also enables partners to provide access to these applications and services in a way that enables the organization to maintain governance and security. For example, organizations may decide they want to turn off a certain capability or feature that would otherwise be impossible if end users were accessing a cloud application directly.
In general, Stillwell says Citrix is seeing a marked increase in activity across its channel since revamping its programs and product portfolio in 2018. Partner productivity increased by 16 percent year over year, thanks in part to the efforts of over 900 new partners, says Stillwell. Overall, Citrix saw its cloud business increase by over 300 percent in the last year with over 1.7 million active users.
“We’ve blown away our cloud goals,” says Stillwell.
Citrix has been making a slow but steady transition to the cloud. The company expects the total addressable market for Intelligent Workspaces enabled by Citrix Cloud to eventually be 4X greater than the market for app and desktop virtualization technologies.
As the number of applications and services any organization consumes continue to exponentially increase in the age of the cloud, it’s clear access control, and governance has become a major pain point. Naturally, that creates a significant opportunity for channel partners to deliver services. In most cases, Citrix is betting partners will prefer to base those services on a platform it provides rather than trying to build and maintain a custom IT platform on their own.
It remains to be seen to what degree partners can bring some order to chaotic application environments in the age of the cloud. But it’s clear that one way or another organizations of all sizes will soon need to address the issue.
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