Citrix simplifies partner rewards programme

Citrix's channel chief has started to make good on his pledge to make life easier for resellers with a revamp of the vendor's  partner reward scheme.

Craig Stilwell started to run the channel side of things at Citrix last year and made it clear that one of his main tasks was stripping out complexity in the relationship between the vendor and its partners.

The announcement of a revamp of the vendor's Ultimate Rewards scheme was made at the Citrix Summit 2018, which has been running in California for the last couple of days.

The main changes in the revised scheme include a consolidation of multiple incentive programmes into just two options; a significant drop in the deal-related questions that partner sales reps have to answer from around 30 to 9; making it possible to track the process and use more automation for registration and approval.

The Ultimate Rewards programme comes into force on 10 February and the vendor is making training sessions available from next week to guide partners through the changes.

"When I assumed the role of Citrix channel chief last year, I announced my vision to reduce the complexity of our channel programs. It was time to reassess our outdated channel program and ensure that we make it easy for partners to do business with Citrix. Simplifying business processes is, ironically, quite complicated. But it’s worth all the effort when it helps strengthen customer and partner relationships," stated Stilwell in a blog post.

"The system has the ability to approve requests automatically, beginning on Day One. While the number of automatic approvals will be relatively small at launch, as our AI improves, we’ll continue to expand the thresholds until the majority of registrations are approved or rejected automatically," he added.

The other two challenges that Stilwell set himself at the start of last year, along with simplifying the partner programme, was to increase the vendor's presence in the mid-market and help the channel make the transition to the cloud.

As well as making changes to the partner programme one of the other themes that emerged from the first day of the Summit was a signal that this could be the year that Desktop as a Service hits the mainstream.

“In the last several years people have surmised time and again that every coming year will be “The Year of VDI.’ In truth, VDI has been on an upward trend over many years. We are seeing that 2018 will be the start of the same trend for DaaS adoption. Hosting options and management features have evolved and turnkey “Pure DaaS” desktops are emerging. 2018 will indeed be the year of significant DaaS adoption,” commented Jason Smith, vp products at Liquidware.