Dell has a long history of working closely with partners to deliver comprehensive solutions that work “better together” for our customers. Our team has worked closely with Citrix for over 20 years, and through thousands of hours of joint engineering work, Dell and Citrix have architected a wide range of solutions to support customers’ desktop virtualization ambitions.
At Citrix Summit 2015, we’ve been talking with our channel partners to hear about how we can support them as trusted advisors to their customers.
Dell’s partner event at Summit this year was a packed house! I had an opportunity to interview a panel of experts including Gunnar Berger, CTO of Citrix Desktop Applications Group, Randy Lewis, senior director of business development and sales at NVIDIA, and Eugene Alfaro (pictured above), CTO and board member of Cornerstone Technologies, a Dell and Citrix partner.
We also heard a great strategy update from Jeff Thibeault, senior manager of North America cloud client-computing channel sales at Dell. It was a lively exchange of ideas with the audience of 70 partners providing their perspective, posing questions, and sharing knowledge.
One message we continue to hear loud and clear: it’s essential that our channel partners are equipped with the knowledge and skillset to help sell, deploy, and support the end-to-end solutions we develop. The Dell Cloud Client-Computing team is laser-focused on providing partners with comprehensive end-to-end solutions that they can take to customers, as well as world-class training and enablement via the Desktop Virtualization Solutions Competency, a simplified program and engagement model to streamline their business interactions with Dell.
Dell’s Desktop Virtualization Solutions Competency now features courses specifically designed to train partners on the sales and technical benefits of joint Dell and Citrix solutions for desktop virtualization. Since streamlining and updating the Desktop Virtualization Competency training and requirements, Dell has seen more than 30 percent increase in the past year in the number of Dell partners who have completed the competency globally.
We’ve also recently introduced the Dell Citrix Campaign-in-a-Box to provide our partners with the tools they need. Developed in conjunction with Citrix, the site contains valuable sales enablement materials like call scripts and product guides, as well as demand generation materials for partners that can be co-branded with their own logos, images, and copy, allowing partners to create their own customized demand generation campaign around Dell and Citrix solutions.
We’ve also developed innovative sales tools like the Cloud Client-Computing Partner Advisor to help reduce sales cycles by allowing partners to size and configure customized Citrix solutions based on proven Dell reference architectures in a matter of minutes through an easy-to-navigate, web-based tool. The resulting output lists all of the required datacenter hardware, end points, and software needed to deploy the solution.
Finally, we added new ready-to-use VDI templates in the PartnerDirect Online Solutions Configurator tool for Wyse Datacenter XC Appliances for Citrix XenDesktop. This allows partners to easily create and customize a web-Scale converged appliance VDI solution through a unique and simple self-service online portal.
With the deep-rooted Dell and Citrix collaboration, everybody wins.
