Outstanding commitment. Serious growth. Impressive sales.

These are a few of the words that describe our top-performing partners — Dimension Data, Ultima Business Solutions, and XenTegra. Their hard work creating unprecedented success for customers and making an impact on the industry is why I was honored to recognize them at Citrix Summit as our 2019 Worldwide Partners of the Year.

It’s also why I wanted to learn what makes them so successful in an incredibly competitive market. I caught up with each and asked them to give me some insights on their businesses — and to share their opportunities and challenges for the year ahead.

Dimension Data — 2019 Partner of the Year, APJ

A global Citrix partner since 2011, Dimension Data is a leader in digital innovation with strong vertical expertise in financial services, media, and communications, as well as the manufacturing and public-sector industries. Over the last year, the Johannesburg-based provider led the charge in APJ to become the number one partner for new Cloud bookings with a stunning 30 percent growth rate — the highest Citrix sales of any partner across all of APJ.

“The 2019 Partner of the Year award was a real testament to our approach, hard work, and partnership over the last year,” says Ed Phillips, General Manager of Digital Workplace Practice, Dimension Data. “The time our joint team put in at events and sales campaigns paid off; however, I believe where we really proved our value as a partner was through our go-to-market approach.”

He attributes some of the incredible growth in their Citrix business to their focus on educating clients in the very early stages. They worked closely with both Citrix and Microsoft to communicate the productivity and cost benefits of Citrix Cloud on the Microsoft Azure platform to their clients.

As an $8 billion global systems integrator and managed services provider with over 28,000 employees across 47 countries on five continents, Dimension Data has successfully leveraged next-generation Citrix solutions to reduce cost and complexity for thousands of clients.

What challenges lay ahead in FY19?

“Clients are wrestling with how to surface data and applications to users in a seamless way across multiple devices and locations,” Phillips says. He looks forward to delivering on this vision in a secure and manageable way with both Citrix Cloud and Digital Workplace services. “We can accelerate this growth and continue to deliver clients a frictionless and engaging end-user experience through Citrix and Microsoft joint solutions.”

Follow Dimension Data on Twitter and LinkedIn.

XenTegra — 2019 Partner of the Year, Americas

For over a decade, Platinum Citrix Partner XenTegra has been innovating Citrix solutions across North America.

As an expert provider integrating digital workspace consulting, managed services, hosting, and education, XenTegra’s passion for end-user computing has driven extraordinary results. Over the last year alone, they delivered the highest growth in the Americas for product sales and trained over 1,000 customers.

Pete Downing, Chief Marketing and Technology Officer at XenTegra, says the symbiosis between Citrix and XenTegra is due in large part to founder Andy Whiteside’s visionary approach.

“Andy’s premise was very simple. It’s about being a true partner and enabling the community. Andy believes in treating the client relationship as a two-way street, not just a one-way street.”

How is 2019 shaping up for XenTegra? “Our strategic priorities are Citrix Cloud and Workspace,” Downing says. “We want to bring people to the cloud, but we’re also interested in non-traditional Citrix uses, such as end-user computing use cases, single sign-on scenarios, SaaS-based scenarios, secure browser, etc. This really opens the door for potential new white-space opportunities.”

XenTegra is also focusing on how to marry Microsoft with Citrix. This includes educating the market that Windows virtual desktops is not a competitor to Citrix. Citrix is enabling Azure and Windows desktops in the cloud, and Downing says one of their key jobs is to teach the customer how to take those two things and make them better.

One goal remains unchanged: to always provide better services for customers. “We’re going to follow a good methodology that prioritizes customer success, utilization in the cloud and ensuring that they continue to use the products,” Downing says.

Another shift ahead in 2019 is more cross-selling into the pure ADC market. “Analytics is the next big step for the ADC market,” Downing says. Having visibility into the way end-users behave, how the traffic is flowing, and where there might be issues is critical. Often they deal with organizations who want to incorporate analytics into their security posture. “When somebody does something anomalous, they can actually see that with the analytics from the Citrix ADC. It’s powerful.”

Being recognized as the Partner of the Year for the Americas was the first of several accolades earned by the North Carolina-based provider at Summit this year. They were also one of three finalists in the Citrix 2019 Innovation Award for Partners for their work developing end-to-end secure virtual workspaces that empowered their client, Custom Molded Products, to expand into new global markets.

XenTegra was also honored by IGEL as 2018 Marketing Partner of the Year during the IGEL Partner Lunch at Citrix Summit.

Follow XenTegra on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Ultima Business Solutions — 2019 Partner of the Year, EMEA

For over 28 years, Citrix Platinum Partner Ultima has evolved into an industry-leading fulfillment, professional and managed IT services provider that excels in building workspaces for the future. Ultima had another fast-moving, transformative year investing further in innovative technologies, evolving the business from being a traditional IT solutions provider to a modern infrastructure and automation services provider with a huge network and security offering, leading the UK in the journey to cloud.

Ultima focuses on providing business consultancy to their clients so that they can use IT to transform the way they do business. While doing this they have increased their profitability, grown their customer base by 20 percent, and increased revenue from £100M to over £110M. They’ve also recruited an additional 20 employees, taking their staff total to 450, with 750 corporate clients.

“Being recognized as Citrix’s EMEA Partner of the year confirms that Ultima’s ongoing business transformation and strategy changes are delivering exceptional value to our customers,” says Gareth Meyer, Director of Sales Operations, Ultima.

In 2018, Ultima grew their already massive Citrix business by 30 percent. How did they do it? By creating unique, customer-specific solutions that deliver transformational outcomes for customers.

“Citrix is a big part of our strategic technology focus, and we’ve worked closely together to take our customers on a journey by enabling business transformation through technology. This recognition confirms our strategic partnership works as we continue to enable, innovate and deliver world-class services to our enterprise customers globally. This can only be achieved by working collaboratively,” Meyer says.

It doesn’t hurt that Ultima’s technical abilities are recognized among the best in the industry. Add to that a well-executed partner strategy and deep understanding of what can be achieved by integrating Citrix’s technologies to achieve an outcome — “this combination is always going to be a success.”

In 2019, Meyer anticipates working closely with Ultima’s strategic technology partners and is excited about the value Citrix offers when deploying services as joint propositions. “Ultima will continue to engage across all of the Citrix technologies: Workspace, Networking, Analytics, as well as our own Managed Services Portfolio.”

Follow Ultima on Twitter.

Please join me once again in congratulating our 2019 WW Partners of the Year! I’m looking forward to the year ahead and all of the amazing things we’ll do together. Want to learn more about how our partners are helping customers realize the future of work? Visit our Partner Insights page.

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