News

M&A: Virtually Unlimited Opportunity

• By Anne Stuart
• February 25, 2008

Citrix President and CEO Mark Templeton talked recently with editors from the Redmond Media Group about the challenges and opportunities involved in folding XenSource's channel operations into its own.

Did XenSource have an active channel program? If they did, did you essentially just pick it up and run with it?
Yes, and yes. When we acquired the company, they had approximately 400 integration partners reselling their software. When we announced the acquisition, we encouraged all Citrix partners that wanted an early entry into the market to go to XenSource and join their program. After we completed the acquisition, we began the process of combining the programs, presenting the different sides and recruiting and actively engaging our channel network. Coming into 2008, we had approximately 1,000 integration partners in the program and in the process of being certified and trained. Our goal is to exit Q1 with an additional 1,000, and then we'll grow organically from there.

Did partners know about Xen or has there been a lot of education that had to take place?
Some were familiar with Xen and Xen Server. We've actually learned a lot from those partners in terms of how to best communicate with other Citrix partners that didn't have any awareness of Xen Server.

And we've been doing a great job of getting the word out through our normal partner communications network. It hasn't been too difficult because, frankly, so many of them have taken on VMware practices over the last few years, so they understand the core value proposition of server virtualization.

We're able to add on top of that strategy that we're delivering an easy-to-use, high-performance, highly compatible server virtualization product that's great at running Windows workloads, but that also complements [Citrix] Presentation Server. We also have our game plan for introducing Xen Desktop [this year], which we believe will be the most comprehensive desktop virtualization solution in the market. I think that they're very receptive to this sort of larger-picture view.

What advice are you giving partners trying to build virtualization infrastructures?
We're introducing them to the three quests that we've outlined for Citrix for the next five years, where we're able to tell a customer that we can provide an infrastructure to have a dynamic data center, an infrastructure to deliver every application at the surface, and [the ability] to convert the desktop, in many cases for office workers, from deployed devices into an IT service.

As a Citrix partner, you'll be able to choose one or more of those quests to participate in, represent our products and understand how they interoperate and how they individually deliver value to the customer.