This past month James and Eli had met up to discuss what was being discussed in the external and internal Citrix meetings.  Due to James’ daily schedule, he is not always available to attend all of the meetings.  This enables James to be informed on whatever material that he misses at these meetings and allows both him and Eli to have more insight into how their departments can help each other with their current Citrix objectives.  James and Eli both found this meeting to be very informative and intend to continue doing them each week.  

Additionally, James had a conversation with Luci pertaining to obtaining vouchers for the Xendesktop CCA exam.  This is one of James’ current objectives that he is aiming to complete shortly.  This training material will enable James to ultimately be more informed on Citrix XenDesktop as well as provide him with that certification.  He then intends to share his education with his team to better enable them to better sell Citrix products through Ingram Micro.

Chris, a member of our Citrix technical support team had expressed his concern on handling some of the more complex Citrix deployment conversations that we often will have with our customers.  James has given Chris the option of brining him into these calls whenever he finds them to be too technical for him to handle. By doing this, Chris is learning a great deal on how to provide full Citrix solutions for our customers and is becoming more enabled on how to sell this product.  

In the past month James and Dan had talked with Lisa to set up James to take over the webinar presentation on licensing Microsoft with Citrix XenDesktop.  They fine tuned this presentation to better meet the demands of the VAR community to better target their pain points.  This then will likely result in them being able to sell more Citrix due to having a higher amount of knowledge and comfort level when licensing out this product.  

On the last week, James gave licensing Microsoft with Citrix XenDesktop webinar presentation to the VAR community.  The presentation was received very well by the community.  We intend to continue this webinar and possibly add different types to continue on addressing these pain points, resulting in an increased amount of sales for Citrix through Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro technical support technician Chris had a call in which the customer was looking for a lower number of support incidents for XenDesktop similar to the five pack offered with the VCX.  Considering that the support offerings are only aimed towards the Enterprise, this customer was not pleased.  I recommend creating smaller support packs to increase customer satisfaction and sales in the SMB market.

Our technical lead James had a call in which the customer was looking for documentation to aide him in installing Xenapp 6.0.  Unfortunately the administrator guide for Xenapp 6.0 has still not been released.

I recommend addressing this lack of documentation as soon as possible.  This would increase the amount of successful installations for VARs and end users alike, resulting in increased sales for both Citrix and Ingram Micro.

Ingram Micro technician Daniel had a great suggestion to a future hardware model.  Considering that Citrix has several appliances such as the Netscaler that can function on multiple levels, and considering that customers purchasing a Repeater often require a Netscaler, it would be beneficial for Citrix to look into a unified appliance for the Repeater, Netscaler and Access Gateway.  It would be far more economical to have redundant appliances for two boxes rather than four in terms of hardware cost and  this cost savings could then be passed down to both Citrix and the Customer directly.  This would be a more attractive alternative in comparison to the competition in terms of simplicity and cost. 
