Being immersed in the energy, excitement, and enthusiasm at Citrix Summit ’19 was an amazing kick-off to the year. As the new Group Director of WW Partner Marketing, Communications and Enablement, it was a perfect opportunity to meet people within Citrix, as well as many of our partners.

Whether it was an electrifying morning keynote, a meaningful chat over lunch, or a new friendship at the Partner Appreciation Party, I was impressed with the many ways Summit brought Citrix and our partners closer together.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve had the opportunity to serve in various partner marketing leadership roles across our industry and have learned firsthand how important personal connections are. They don’t just help put faces with names. They also generate enduring partnerships that can result in greater business outcomes for everyone. It’s a big part of what brings people back to Summit year after year, and I believe why this year’s event was the largest ever, with over 5,000 attendees!

Bridging people and technology is a central part of Summit because it’s a central value of our company — and a core vision for the future of work. Citrix is uniquely positioned in 2019 to expand this vision beyond virtualization to provide customers with a roadmap that will truly transform their business and substantially grow our market.

Citrix President and CEO David Henshall shared this strategy in more detail during the opening keynote, which outlined key goals for the coming year, including how we will:

  • Deliver an intelligent digital workspace — People are the single most valuable asset at any company. Yet more than half of employees in a typical Fortune 500 company remain disengaged. “One of the reasons for this is, frankly, a non-holistic and often inconsistent IT strategy,” Henshall observed. “With such a proliferation of devices and apps, IT has had to focus on locking down devices and data, and that has constrained people.” This year, Citrix will seize this unique opportunity to bridge the gap between people and technology by making work less complicated and less restrictive.
  • Be the preferred way to work for 1 billion people — It’s a dizzying goal and completely within reach. “Billions of individuals rely on technology day in and day out to get their jobs done,” Henshall said. “And yet over all these years, as an industry, we have only been able to make virtualization relevant to about 20 to 30 percent of employees at any given organization. The question is, why?” That’s where Citrix Workspace comes in. Workspace provides a solution for users who don’t require virtualization, and empowers them with a unified, secure, and resilient way to access the information they need — in any enterprise, anywhere in the world. The result: customers who are more productive, engaged, and focused in their organizations.
  • Evolve employee experience to a competitive advantage — Thinking about people as workloads is just not going to get it done anymore. To retain top talent, our customers must provide an employee experience that’s intuitive, simple, and empowering, and Citrix will be there to help them through this transition. With the intelligent workspace, Citrix is moving beyond just organizing work to guiding and automating it.
  • Provide more choice and security — Citrix solutions will continue to empower your customers have the freedom of choice — choice of device, of cloud provider, of infrastructure — with security that’s embedded and contextual and that dynamically follows users.

It’s a great time to be with Citrix! Summit ’19 might be over but the excitement isn’t. Stay engaged by watching the keynotes on demand and participating in upcoming webinars to create more success for your customers and your business!

Keep the knowledge coming with these webinars:

  • Partner KickStart — Email is not dead. Ninety-five percent of brands use email marketing for demand generation, but 53 percent of prospects say they receive too much email. What gives? Learn email marketing best practices to effectively generate demand in a crowded space. Join us February 13, 2019, 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. EST to learn more.
  • Partner Programs Updates 2019 — Learn more about the updates to Accelerate, new promotions, and changes to requirements for the specialist program by watching this on-demand webinar.

Register Today for Summit ’20
All of us at Citrix are extremely excited to continue the momentum throughout the rest of the year, and, of course, we hope to see you all at Summit ’20, January 13-15 in Orlando, Florida. It’s never too early to get a head start. Register today.

Stay connected!

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Learn how to become a Citrix Partner — or build your Citrix Partner business as a Citrix Specialist — today.

Looking to implement a world-class digital workspace, networking, and analytics solutions? Find a Citrix partner in your area.