Much to the frustration of everyone involved, most organizations have stumbled into mobile computing. The rate at which mobile computing applications and devices are being adopted caught many organizations and, by extension, their solution providers by surprise. The challenge that many of them now face is that creating a truly mobile enterprise is a fairly complex endeavor.
For the most part, a truly mobile enterprise involves products and services spanning everything from the device itself to the cloud. Mastering all those technologies can be challenging, especially when you consider all security requirements and different types of virtualization that needs to be applied.
Recognizing those issues, Rafael Garzon, the new channel chief for the Americas at Citrix, explained that partners of Citrix will soon see a lot more work in the way of reference architectures that solution providers can apply to various mobile computing scenarios. Rather than having to continually piece products and services together on their own, the goal is to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to deliver a mobile computing solution to a customer, Garzon said.
That’s critical at a time when demand for mobile computing solutions is exceeding the capacity of solution providers to keep pace. Even in scenarios where a solution provider may not have sold the device or even the application running on that device, enabling all the IT infrastructure required to support those applications, is creating a boon for solution providers. Of course, if a solution provider has to craft a solution for every customer from scratch, their ability to address that opportunity is going to be fairly limited.
Once those reference architectures are in place, Citrix will not only plow more resources into training partners; it will spend a lot of time and energy aligning the efforts of its sales staff with those of its partners, Garzon said.
Like most vendors these days, Citrix realizes there is a significant gap in its go-to-market strategy as it applies to the channel. The good news is that realizing there is an actual issue is usually the first sign that solutions to close that gap will soon be at hand.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.