During the Month of April I began working with my counterpart on the west coast to a higher degree.  Rufus Bloomfield had rarely leveraged technical support before this month and now does on a more regular basis.  Rufus’ new-found technical resource should help him increase sales for Citrix through Ingram Micro.

Near the beginning of April, I had worked with Sean , a member of the Citrix team on doing a final role play.  What this involved was I would create a situation that I would suggest to Sean that is a very complex, in depth Citrix presales issue.  Sean will then play the role of the tech and attempt to answer my question as if I were an actual customer.  Doing this role play helps both Sean and James discover Sean’s weaknesses on the Citrix team. 

Another method that I used to gage where his team’s knowledge is lacking is call recording.  During the month of April I recorded several of my technicians’ phone calls.  I would then play them back, finding areas for improvement where they could have suggested different Citrix features and products.  The results are then presented to the team member and they are coached accordingly.  This method aims at increasing the technician’s ability to further sell Citrix products through Ingram Micro.

Near the end of April Citrix released the Netscaler SDX appliance.  This appliance was not released with an area that the technical or licensing teams could use for resources.  On one of our slower days, I decided that I would search Citrix’s site for any and all documentation that could help our teams.  I then released my findings to the team and asked for further documentation on areas that were lacking.  This information has come in handy in customer questions asking for SDX solutions to be quoted by Ingram Micro. 


Andrew, our Solution Center Citrix Engineer, had commented that you cannot automatically move machines between LUNs within Xenserver.  You can import and export, but we are seeing demand for the ability to do these transfers automatically.  I would highly advise Citrix looking into incorporating this into their next Xenserver update to make Xenserver more competitive.

Anthony, one of our newest members within technical support had noticed a frequent inquiry into Citrix post sales options.  Customers are calling in asking where online they can find the details on how Citrix offers post sales to their customers.  It would be much easier if Citrix would provide this information to their customers on their website in an easy-to-access link rather than having to have them call into distribution.  Having these options handy will help free up our technician’s availability; enabling our customers to obtain and purchase Citrix products easier.

Ingram Micro technician Robert has noticed that the SMB market often has a harder time getting into Citrix’s products.  He has noticed that the smaller end user customers want to get into a Citrix solution but do not have the staffing to understand all of the details that are required to deploy a solution as involved as Xenapp.  He suggested that Citrix should partner with Cisco and Wyse by releasing a server that contains the majority of the configuration and installation for Xenapp already configured.  Furthermore, all of the licensing would be included for terminal server, and Windows Server.  Also, a second virtual machine would include Access Gateway VPX for the remote users.  Finally, a bundled quantity of thin clients from Wyse would be included to handle the client machines.  This setup would be targeted towards the SMB market and scale from a 10 user bundle up to 50 users.  Considering the complexity involved in a Xenapp installation, I would recommend looking into a bundle to target and increase sales within the SMB market space.
