For nearly 30 years, our mission at Citrix has remained largely unchanged. Put simply: We securely connect people and information anytime, anywhere, and on any device. It’s this simple concept that drives how we work and the solutions we create to solve our customers’ problems. In the 14 years that I’ve been with the company, I’ve been a part of many exciting changes that have helped us to continue to grow and thrive. Today, however, I can honestly say that I’ve never been more excited to be at Citrix. Why?
The customer is at the core of our business like never before.
It’s no secret that Citrix is in the midst of a transformation right now, transitioning from a strictly perpetual licensing model to offering subscriptions and Cloud Services to our customers for all Citrix products, giving them the flexibility they desire, regardless of whether they choose to deploy our solutions on-premises, in a public cloud, or in a hybrid model. This transition allows us to remove complexity, while also dramatically increasing our agility and the speed at which we can deliver innovation.
As our most recent earnings show, this transformation is happening much faster than we originally expected. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. If you look at this transition through our customers’ eyes, it becomes pretty clear what’s driving this demand: The exceptional experience.
In a traditional model, the post-purchase heavy lifting falls, in large part, on the customer. With a subscription service, however, that flips. When a customer decides to purchase Citrix Cloud services, that customer is trusting us to be there with them every step of the way. And that’s a commitment we take very seriously.
When you choose to use Citrix products via the cloud platform, you get a new kind of partnership with Citrix.
We’ve spent a great deal of time talking about the benefits of the cloud from a product perspective — less complexity, faster updates, etc. — but now I want us to start spreading the word about the overall experience benefits we are hearing from our early cloud customers, and how we’re evolving a few key areas based on that feedback.
Let’s start at the moment of purchase. That moment is the “closing of the transaction” for a perpetual license; we’ll see you in a few years when you are ready to upgrade. But it’s the very beginning of the engagement for a cloud customer.
We have a dedicated Cloud Adoption team, maniacally focused on customer success. Each customer has a dedicated Customer Success Manager, whose main mission is to understand the customer’s goals and desired outcomes. More than that, customers have a full suite of offerings focused on getting their cloud environment up and running as quickly as possible. In fact, our early cloud customers are finding that they are able to deploy in 1/3 (or less) of the time as with perpetual licenses.
But it doesn’t stop at deployment. Your Customer Success Manager will provide tools, processes, trainings, counsel, and best practices geared toward enabling the customer’s end users to adopt the technology and use it the way they intend. Not once. Not just for a couple of weeks. You get this forever. Citrix is there to monitor end-user usage and bring ideas to help customers find the features and functionality they need to meet their goals.
Our Cloud Adoption team joins tech support, consulting, and sales in an integrated mission to support our customers.
Now, I should note that there is no single thing that defines our transition to a hybrid cloud model as a company. Every facet of our business has to change in some way — how we market our solutions, how we bill our customers, how we operate together — and the list of benefits for our customers is quite long. But one thing is crystal clear:
With Citrix Cloud services, we only succeed when our customers succeed.
And that’s an experience worth celebrating. Every day, my goal is to ensure that every single person at Citrix is focused on putting our customers first. I want all Citrix employees to understand that they have a role in customer success, regardless of their position, level or title.
In a world of complexity, cloud sprawl, disruption and the like, I believe that we can only succeed together.
