The LUI service is a FREE cloud-based service that has been built for our Citrix Service Provider (CSP) partners to help them simplify, accelerate and accurately report their monthly usage while providing significant business insights into CSP service usage.
In other words, the LUI service enables CSPs to:
- Collect and aggregate product usage information from Citrix license servers
- View which users are accessing XenApp and XenDesktop deployments each month
- Optimize license costs by identifying and tracking a list of free users
- View and understand CSP’s historic business with Citrix
Currently, LUI supports XenApp, XenDesktop and Netscaler licenses. However, LUI will soon expand to encompass other Citrix product lines.
Even though LUI is available only to the CSP partners today (we are in the works to implement a distributor view in LUI in the future), Citrix highly encourages our distributors to promote LUI to our partners as there is significant intrinsic value LUI brings to the distributors for the following reasons:
Reporting Accuracy
By leveraging the reporting capabilities of LUI, partners will provide a more accurate monthly usage report to the distributors thereby minimizing under-reporting and ensuring appropriate revenue collection for the distributors.
As mentioned, LUI is a cloud-based application that does not require deploying of any manual reporting tools or manually aggregating and tracking usage data. It is a one stop solution for product usage aggregation and hence provides a huge value add to both partners and to the distributors. This capability ensures that revenue collection happens in a timely manner and with minimal error.
For many service providers, a dedicated Citrix environment (and thus license server) is deployed for each customer. When using this delivery model, monthly license usage per-license server maps directly to monthly license usage per customer – enabling service providers to understand monthly active use for those customers.
In order to ensure reporting accuracy, LUI has the capability of determining which of the licensing servers are reporting vs. the ones that are not reporting back to the LUI server. This minimizes the chances of the service provider under reporting now that they have complete insight into the licensing servers and their configurations.
LUI also has the ability to distinguish between licenses that are used in production versus trial or internal-use licenses. This feature comes in extremely handy for reducing cost of sales, of POCs, and of internal development.
LUI also provides that ability for the partner to download the license usage on to a CSV file.
Trend Analysis
Another important feature of LUI is that it allows service providers to access their lifetime reporting history. This is an extremely powerful tool for the service providers as it allows them to analyze trends, understand subscriber growth and make critical decisions based on this license utilization data. Having access to this historical data allows the CSPs to up-sell and cross-sell relevant Citrix based services to their customers thereby increasing usage.
A Cloud-First Approach
Since the LUI Service is available via Citrix Cloud, updates and new features are pushed automatically without any installation or updates required by the CSP. Using a cloud based approach, CSPs can now aggregate and organize license usage in one place across a variety of environments by leveraging this cloud service – dramatically simplifying usage collection and monthly reporting.
In summary, LUI is a great tool that not only helps the partner simplify their product usage reporting, it also supports the distributor in accurate revenue collection. For more information on how to get started with LUI, please click here.
We have a LUI webinar specifically focused for the Distributors scheduled for March 7, 2017. We highly encourage all distributors to attend this session and understand the key values LUI brings to them and to our CSP partners.
Details of the webinar:
Description: This distributor-specific webinar will cover the main features of LUI and how it adds value to both partners and distributors. It will also serve as a training session for distributors on LUI.
Webinar Date: 03/07/2017, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EST and 10:00 PM – 11:00 PM EST
Registration Link: http://enablement.citrix.com/library/items/905
We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!
