As the busy travel season kicks off for 2020, I’m reflecting on Citrix Summit 2020. My eighth Summit here at Citrix, it was the busiest and winningest Summit ever!
First, I was honored to play again in the annual Summit Cup (the John C. Burris Memorial Cup)! The hockey tournament began more than 10 years ago and continued into 2020 with two evenly matched teams fighting it out until the third period. The good guys (yes, that would be my team) fought back from a 6-4 deficit to claim victory, 7-6.
Many of the same players come out each year to play — Citrix employees, partners, and customers — and it is an outstanding example of friendship and camaraderie. It got me thinking about our friends and colleagues in Strategic Alliances across the industry and the relationships we have built up over the years.
The next night, I hosted our annual Strategic Alliances Award dinner, where I was able to be with many longtime friends in our industry and recognized our Strategic Alliances partners for their contributions in 2019.
Citrix is defining the future of work. But we’re also defining the future of innovation in strategic alliances. This year, our awards recognized excellence in a Workspace Alliance, Workspace Innovation, Networking Alliances, Marketing Innovation, and finally, the Strategic Alliances Partner of the Year.
Alongside the Summit Cup winners, here are the Citrix Strategic Alliances Award Winners for 2019.
Citrix Workspace Strategic Alliance Award — 2019: Google Cloud
In 2019, we expanded our alliance with Google Cloud to address the unique ways Citrix and Google Cloud can deliver a digital workspace. We’ve worked closely with them to land several big deals with customers looking for a Citrix Workspace for the Google ecosystem. Check out our recent blog post highlighting the successful deployment for Oncology Venture. This included our workspace solutions for both Android and Chrome Enterprise and strong collaboration to accelerate the build out of our Android offerings. On the applications side, Google Cloud was the first partner to sign up for and integrate with our Access Control offering for Workspace SaaS delivery of G Suite. G Suite is also incorporated into an intelligent work feed to simplify work as part of the intelligent capabilities of Citrix Workspace. Congratulations to Google Cloud!
Citrix Workspace Innovation Strategic Alliance Award – 2019: HPE
Innovation comes in many forms and this year, we recognized HPE for their commitment to Citrix Workspace solutions and their innovative consumption model, HPE Greenlake. HPE built the “HPE Intelligent Experience for Citrix Workspace” to deliver advisory services for workplace transformation and, eventually, to deliver Citrix Workspace through the Greenlake consumption-based offering. The HPE Pointnext Digital Workplace team have hired dedicated resources focused on solution development and GTM, and they have a strong Microsoft Teams and O365 practice where they are bringing Citrix Workspace and Microsoft together for their customers. HPE have already built a significant pipeline of opportunities and are training many in their sales and pursuit teams worldwide on this next-generation offering with Citrix Workspace and its intelligent features. They continue to invest in expanding this offering and we expect to see more in 2020. Congratulations to HPE!
Citrix Networking Strategic Alliance Award – 2019: AWS
AWS is a Citrix ADC priority partner and both sides are investing in advancing Layer-7 cloud networking solutions. In late 2019, we saw the joint launch of Citrix ADC with support for AWS Outposts, VPC Ingress Routing services, as well as jointly developed AWS Quick-Starts for Citrix ADC and formal AWS Certification of Citrix ADC within the AWS Network Competency program. Citrix SD-WAN is also certified and has already launched support for AWS Transit Gateway. On the go-to-market front, AWS is investing in unique ways to drive Citrix Networking solutions as a part of their sales motions and promoting Citrix Networking in their hybrid-cloud use cases. Congratulations to AWS!
Citrix Marketing Strategic Alliances Award – 2019: Cisco
This award recognizes some of the unique work we’ve delivered with Cisco for joint marketing. The Citrix and Cisco Joint Digital Marketing Hub is a joint digital hub with a co-branded website that showcases joint Citrix and Cisco workspace and networking solutions. Whether the focus is on Citrix ADC and Cisco ACI or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Cisco HX systems, the hub provides a consistent user experience for both solutions. In addition, the hub is used as an event landing page for annual customer events, such as Citrix Synergy and Cisco Live. The results are staggering, with steady engagements (more than 20,000 total new visitors) and repeat visitors of 15 percent. The benefits are consolidated lead capture, single dashboard for reporting/metrics, and ability to cross-sell/up-sell/retarget prospects. Since its introduction earlier this year, Cisco has made this joint digital hub the new standard for marketing excellence across all of its strategic alliances. Congratulations Cisco!
Citrix Strategic Alliance Partner of the Year – 2019: Microsoft
Citrix and Microsoft have, arguably, the strongest and longest-lasting strategic alliance in the industry; 2019 saw the continued growth of this partnership in the cloud and workspace world. Microsoft continues to drive the largest bookings and pipeline of any of our strategic alliance partners. In 2019, our partnership produced a significant joint collaboration between Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly Windows Virtual Desktop) and Citrix Managed Desktops. Citrix was the first key launch partner and is a Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop preferred provider. This was built on more than a year of joint collaboration between product and engineering, go-to-market, and alliance teams. Thank you, Microsoft, for the long standing partnership, and congratulations!
Thank you to all our winners this year — Summit Cup winners (and the losers) and to our strategic alliances partners who have won awards. You are all good friends, good partners, and I thank you for all you do. Cheers to 2019, and I’m looking forward to a tremendous 2020. See you out there delivering the future of work (and on the ice!).
