During the month of February we launched a Citrix Netscaler contest.  This is the first product recommendation contest that has been launched in tech support in several years.  The Citrix team’s goal is to raise the recommendations for Netscaler by bringing up the benefits of Netscaler in Xenapp and Xendesktop deployments and raise the sales for this product through Ingram Micro.

This past month James had been meeting several times with Andrew.  These meetings aimed to bridge the technical gaps between the technicians’ knowledge.  Increasing the knowledge of our technicians helps in their ability to further enable sales of Citrix through Ingram Micro.

After the meetings with Andrew, James began working on a Xendesktop edition comparison chart.  This chart is a more elaborately defined chart explaining the different editions of Citrix’s flagship product.  His intent is to provide this to both his team for assisting in their daily conversations, as well as for the VARs that are calling in with Xendesktop related questions.  Having this resource for both parties will help them further enable the sale of Xendesktop through Ingram Micro.

During February James had met with Rick, the Principal Architect for the Cloud App delivery Group at Citrix.  They discussed where Citrix was intending on moving in the cloud virtualization space.  Giving James this knowledge ahead of time better enables him to prepare his team for the questions that will be coming from our VAR partners.  This enhances their ability to recommend Citrix solutions for these partners.

Over the last two weeks in February James prepared a ramp up for two new technicians.  This consists of a ten hour training in which James presents and educates technicians in preparation for taking calls on the Citrix line.  Two technicians, Anthony Scordo and Sean Reardon are intended for the Citrix line next month.  Having these two technicians will better enable us to staff this line and answer the questions for our VARs looking to sell Citrix products.

Technician and Customer Feedback

In the past month James has had several calls asking for specific sizing on common server environments with supporting documentation.  For the majority of these smaller environments we do not have documentation to provide.  If Citrix would produce a white paper for increments of 100 users and how adding an additional 100 users effects utilization for Xenapp/Office 2010 on a modern day server platform then we could provide these papers to our VAR customers.  These white papers would then give them a more secure idea on the server hardware required for their deployment and eliminate their concerns for going with a Citrix solution.

Ingram Micro Citrix technician Robert, whom is also our Juniper lead, had mentioned on how he has had a recent demand on both his Citrix and Juniper lines for clustered virtual VPN appliances.  To elaborate, Robert has had calls in which users were looking for a few thousand users to have remote VPN access into their networks.  Due to the large number, a single Citrix Access Gateway VPX would not suffice.  Considering the demand, clustering two of these together has potential to further increase the sales of Citrix through Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro Citrix technician Chris had commented on how he has had calls from several VARs that were confused as to why there was still documentation posted stating the VPX was not intended for production.  This is potentially costing sales for both Citrix and Ingram Micro and should be changed as soon as possible.
