Citrix is taking this advice to heart: it’s better to show than it is to tell. The Citrix Virtual Computing Demo Center was one of several announcements by Citrix and its vendor partners at the event the week of May 10, 2010. The demo center lets channel partners prepare for a demo and provision a virtualized environment in minutes as they take the message of the benefits of desktop virtualizaiton to customers.
Tom Flink, vice president, Worldwide Channel and Sales Strategy, calls it DDMD: demos, demos and more demos. “Demos are your strategic weapon.”
(VMware is following a similar tack with its VMware Express demo truck that is touring the country this year.)
Mick Hollison, vice president of Desktop Marketing at Citrix, says partners have been demanding a simpler demo capability.
The Citrix Demo Center is an easy-to-use, high-performance, cloud-based virtualization environment used to demonstrate Citrix desktop virtualization and virtual computing solutions. Up to 250 Citrix partners who are certified to sell XenDesktop can receive 90 days of free access to The Demo Center (over $2,000 in value) each quarter in a promotion that runs through June of 2011.
Demos will be of key importance as Citrix strives to win a big piece of the desktop virtualization market. Citrix President and CEO Mark Templeton says Citrix expects explosive growth as the desktop virtualization market mushrooms from less than 1 percent of desktops today to more than 40 percent, worth an estimated $65.7 billion, according to Gartner.
“We’re at the dawn of our time of getting to $25 billion to $50 billion,” he says.
The company will need a lot of help from its 8,200 partners that account for 85 percent of its current $1.5 billion-plus annual run rate, as well as its vendor partners, including new best friend Microsoft.