Paul Fecteau, managing director of partner programs and operations at Citrix, said the goal behind the new incentive program is to increase simplification by doing business with Citrix and generating profits for partners in the cloud market.
Currently, Citrix's incentive program has five different elements, which according to Fecteau were built at different times in the evolution of the Citrix channel. Each element of the program has its own rules, which have required partners to know the details of five different areas to take full advantage of.
"We recognize that this is a challenge, especially for newer partners who are not familiar with Citrix, but even our current partners have been challenged on occasion," Fecteau said.
At the cloud end, Fecteau noted that Citrix has been accelerating its own change to the cloud in recent years and has urged partners to do so.
"The cloud is a new route to the market for many of our partners," he said. "Some of our partners have been selling the cloud for years, but for the partners this is a new route to the market, understanding how to sell the cloud, what are the points of value that a customer needs to understand about an offer in the cloud and , probably, just as important, is what services a partner can offer in relation to a deal in the cloud for a client, because the services are different. "
Starting February 10, Citrix will offer two discount items, Spark and Drive, and a quarterly rebate item, Accelerate.
Spark serves as a replacement for Citrix's Net New Partner Source program and will reward partners for identifying and recording opportunities that Citrix does not know about.
Drive is similar to the current Citrix Advisor rewards program and will pay in the Accelerate bonus of the partners, as well as a discount for the partners of the offer for the delivery of "value sale activities".
Fecteau noted that after the launch of the Citrix Ultimate Rewards program, a new system will ask partners questions about their client and deal and then automatically identify the incentives that the member can receive.
In a blog post today, Craig Stilwell, Citrix's global vice president of sales and strategy partners, said Citrix has reduced the number of business-related questions so that sales representatives of partners respond from 30 to nine.
"While the number of automatic approvals will be relatively small at launch, as our artificial intelligence improves, we will continue to expand the thresholds until most records are automatically approved or rejected," he said.
