Mike Fouts Takes Over as Citrix's New Americas Channel Chief

After eight years as Citrix Americas Channel Chief, Craig Stilwell has stepped aside from the position to become VP of sales in the Southeast United States. Taking Stilwell's place is Mike Fouts, who actually was a director of sales in the territory Stilwell is moving into.

The move took place Oct. 1 but Fouts made it official in his inaugural blog post today, where he outlined his priorities. Fouts, whose actual title now is senior director of Americas channels and field operations, assured partners that Citrix will continue its model of offering programs, solutions and resources aimed at helping both the company and the channel remain profitable.

In his role as channel chief, Fouts also leads the company's marketing efforts. He signaled plans to help the channel monetize opportunities in virtualization and the growing field of cloud computing. "The primary objective of the Citrix channel program will continue to center on offering innovative programs, solutions and resources that make Citrix the most profitable business for the channel community," he wrote.

Fouts outlined three areas he will concentrate on in the upcoming calendar year:

• Provide new tools and information geared toward helping partners take advantage of customer interest in virtualization.
  
  
• Facilitate collaboration between partners and Citrix sales organization. "It's important to me that we increase our focus on identifying and implementing strategies to improve that alignment between our partners and internal sales teams," he noted.
  
  
• Increased emphasis on small and medium businesses. This year's acquisition of Kaviza, enabled the introduction of Citrix's VDI-in-a-Box 5, a virtual appliance that uses the company's HDX technology and supports three hypervisors: Citrix's XenServer, Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMware's vSphere, ESX and ESXi. Fouts said Citrix will extend its sales efforts through the channel targeting SMBs. Enabling that emphasis is the company's newly launched SMB certification program.

Fouts takes over at a challenging time for the channel community. Citrix is a company with a growing number of cloud computing products, many of which are just now coming to market. It also is absorbing a number of relatively small but strategic acquisitions. Meanwhile, many partners are still trying to determine the right revenue model to profitably offer cloud products and services.

If you're a Citrix channel partner in the Americas, what would you like to see from the company's new channel chief? Feel free to comment below, or drop me a line at [email protected].

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on November 28, 2011