The new cloud offering comes from a Canadian-based datacentre, and is designed to appeal to SMBs as well as midmarket customers considering cloud.
They include changes to Professional Services training designed to increase dollar spend, up-leveling Premier partner competency requirements, and a new Demo program which reduces the cost outlay to partners.
Newly spun-off this year, NexGen has made major changes to its channel program to strengthen its support of partners.
While building a strong SMB-focused channel to sell hyperconverged is more challenging than a channel selling to larger customers, Scale is counting on the simplicity of its solution to even the odds for its partners, who are the company’s entire sales force.
Response to the news of the free edition has been exceptionally strong among Canadian partners.
Notable changes include funding a dedicated resource for Platinum partners, enhancing the Demo program with six months of free support and the ability to resell Demo units, and a fourfold increase in MDF funds.
RES has been making digital workspace technology solutions for years, but now, armed with new leadership, a new platform and a market that now finds what it does to be in high demand, the company expects to significantly raise its profile, and its sales.
Quick Heal, which moved into the North American market last month, announced a partner program with up to 50 per cent margins for the select number of partners they will be initially recruiting here.
The new cloud-only solution is targeted at customers who don’t want the expense or trouble or deploying a physical or virtual device locally, and is expected to significantly increase the number of Axcient’s MSP partners.
Maxta also announced MxCloudConnect, a cloud based call-home capability, as well as support for OpenStack Kilo out of the gate.
Stratoscale emerged from stealth late last year with some powerful vendor investors, a unique hyperconverged value proposition and a 100 per cent channel strategy. The plan is for the product to be available this summer.
Michael Murphy, vice-president and country manager of Citrix Canada, reviewed announcements from this year’s Citrix Synergy likely to be of particular interest to Canadian partners and customers.
Citrix provides more assurances about the future of XenApp, and also announces some lower key, but very significant enhancements to both XenApp and XenDesktop.
Citrix’s major announcement at Synergy this year provides huge new opportunities for both CSP and CSA partners, and the channel strategy being finalized is designed to ensure partners who move to the cloud with WorkSpace Cloud will be treated the same way as on-prem partners.
Unidesk’s verification as Citrix Ready adds to the company’s strategy of broadening out beyond their original vSphere base to serve a broader range of customers, through a broader range of partners.
The highlight of the first day at Citrix Synergy was the announcement of Citrix Workspace Cloud, a platform of services for the creation of complete workspaces with a strong MSP play.
Other Day One announcements included XenServer 6.5 Service Pack 1, XenMobile 10.1, and enhancements to Citrix’s ShareFile secure file sharing and syncing tool.
The new platform offers new functionality for MSPs, allowing them to now offer customers support services troubleshooting, diagnosing and remediating help desk issues.
At Citrix Synergy, Dell also announced new versions of two related software solutions, Dell Wyse Device Manager 5.5 and Foglight for Virtualization 8.2.
While the software giant is actively transforming itself into a cloud giant as well, its channel chief says partners need to take fuller advantage of what Microsoft can offer on this journey, and aggressively benchmark themselves in the transformation.
