The two companies have been long-time partners around VDI, but this extension of their relationship makes a very low cost hyper-converged offering, which combines Atlantis’ hyper-converged infrastructure with the full Xen stack, available to any certified Citrix partner.
The new offerings include the Dell Wyse 7040, which becomes Dell’s top of the line thin client, and Wyse ThinLinux, a brand-new thin client-optimized software based on SUSE Linux.
Key elements include Azure becoming Citrix’s preferred cloud platform, and Microsoft Skype for Business now being optimized for the Citrix VDI environment, the only one to receive this preferred treatment.
Citrix’s Canadian country manager Michael Murphy talks about the company’s turnaround, what customers in Canada are looking for, and the new opportunities he sees emerging in Canada for the company and its channel partners.
Seclore, which is India-based, has been making a large push in the North American market, and while they have been selling direct here, are just beginning to build out a channel. The OEM deal with Citrix is their largest to date, and will add significantly to their exposure, while filling what had been a security gap in ShareFile.
IGEL has been in North America for a while, but the company is now investing considerably more in its key partners and its channel program, to develop a core of elite partners to drive market share growth. They are at Citrix Synergy this week discussing future plans with their partners, who also typically sell Citrix.
Citrix CEO Kiril Tatarinov, at his first Citrix Synergy since taking over the company helm earlier this year, outlined to the company’s customers where he plans to take the company.
AVG continues its strategy of adding more focused, value-added distributors with EarthBend, which brings an MSP background and experience with AVG’s Managed Workplace solution, as well as a strong regional presence in both the American mid-west and Canadian prairies.
Nutanix is making changes to its channel strategies around this product, including deal registration, to avoid channel confusion. Lenovo and its channel will also play a key role taking Xpress to market.
Nutanix’s president acknowledged that the industry’s previous announced attempts at a low-cost VDI solution have been basically junk, which have left customers suspicious of such claims. Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix, on the other hand, is an enterprise-capable turnkey solution, which really will come in in the $500 price range, including the endpoint.
SAP and Apigee are both seeing good synergies from their approximately two year-old partnership, the type of ISV alliance strongly being broadly pursued by both companies.
The Lenovo announcements included three joint offerings with integrators around SAP HANA, SAP-related data warehousing and memory announcements, and a hyper-converged sofolution r SAP Business suite applications stemming from their partnership with Nutanix.
SAP Anywhere formally launched in the U.S. this week. But while demand for the small business-focused CRM solution is strong, a change in SAP’s SMB applications strategy has led to the Canadian launch being put on hold for now.
The OCF found that in addition to resolving massively increased complexity in market allocation issues stemming from the growing segmentation of the market, implementing the SAP solution gave them the benefits of CRM for the first time, and enabled them to realize major benefits from going digital.
SAP Canada is thinking about dropping its one billion dollar threshold defining the direct space to the 500-600 million range, but is emphasizing that the idea wouldn’t be to take more business direct, but to make SAP direct resources available to assist partners in the upper half of the SME space.
SAP Business One is fourth in its category with 1.8 per cent market share globally, but its general manager, Luis Murguia, believes a major organizational change which was quietly implemented in April can help to deliver significant growth.
OpenText has historically been mainly a direct player, but is looking to leverage its strong partnership and personal relationships with SAP, and its relationship with SAP partner Accenture to build up its channel business in Canada.
Other Dell SAP-related initiatives announced at SAPPHIRE NOW included ones around the Internet of Things, cloud blueprints to optimize SAP environments, and a new optimized architecture for SAP Foundation for Health.
Hitachi Data Systems has greatly deepened its strategic relationship with SAP around HANA in the last several years, and its new announcements, which cover from the low end of the market to the high, broaden that portfolio.
CEO Bill McDermott didn’t exactly promise a kinder, gentler SAP, but he did pledge a company that will be more empathetic to customers, have a more complete vision, and be more focused on simplicity. He also offered a forecast of some trends he thinks SAP will be well positioned to leverage.
