This past month Dan had an integration question from a reseller pertaining to RSA and Citrix Access Gateway.  Initially Dan had tried to call RSA to get the answer.  He found the experience to be very frustrating and was eventually informed that they were unable to help him. He then turned to leverage Jason Kozak to assist in answering the question.  This was very successful and helpful to the end user due to Jason’s quick response.  Having Dan be able to turn around these questions for our customers as opposed to the end user calling RSA for the answer greatly helps the customer experience in determining compatibility with Citrix and other manufacturer’s products.

Dan and James both attended a Citrix meeting in which Citrix Shark Week and XenDesktop 5 were both discussed.  The information on Shark Week and the free class for XenDesktop were then sent to the team.  Many of our technicians found the information to be beneficial in enabling them to sell and recommend current and future Citrix products and promotions.

In October a reseller had called in to our Virtualization team asking for a very specific application virtualization solution.  Greg, due to completing the Citrix CSP, was able to recognize the benefit that Citrix’s Dazzle could bring to the reseller.  He then arranged for our Citrix team to talk further with him on the topic.  The reseller was very pleased that Citrix was able to accommodate his needs and placed an order for the product.  

An opportunity came across Luci for a Citrix solution in which the reseller wanted to know how Citrix compares to the competition in their support offerings.  Dan was able to assist in identifying these differences.  With having the cross-environment that we have in tech support we are quickly able to turn around answers for questions such as these to help Citrix in identifying their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to the competition.

In tech support we frequently will give tours to resellers.  After the tour had finished, a reseller looking to get into Citrix had several questions.  Dan was able to answer these questions for the reseller whom was then much more comfortable with his understanding on how to position Citrix products.  Due to these answers this reseller is now in a much better position to start recommending Citrix and ultimately brining Citrix sales through Ingram Micro.

Dan had a recent question regarding XenDesktop and bandwidth optimization.  The customer requested recent material backing up Dan’s claims.  He attempted to satisfy this request to the best of his ability but was only able to find relevant reference material dated 2009.  The customer was not entirely satisfied with the outdated documentation.  In the future, providing up-to-date documentation will enable us to raise the comfort level of both the reseller and the end user considering Citrix products as an alternative to the competition.  
After a recent Citrix XenDesktop presentation that Dan had done for resellers he had asked them for feedback.  The general response was that this product is great for enterprise, but due to the infrastructure and Microsoft licensing required, this product did not seem very cost-effective for the SMB customer.  Citrix and Microsoft should provide a less-expensive bundle with a user cap similar to what was done with Xenapp Fundamentals in order to play better in the SMB space.  This would then enable the SMB customer a more cost-effective option and effectively allow Citrix to increase their sales in this market space with Desktop Virtualization.

Often enough, our technical support team is confronted by a VAR with the idea of them hosting XenDesktop.  This is currently not possible due to Microsoft not having a VDA license through SPLA licensing.  It would be beneficial for Citrix to work closer with Microsoft to aide them in developing a license for this scenario to increase their sales in this emerging use scenario.
