This is a guest blog post by Gareth Meyer, Commercial and Operations Director, Ultima Business Solutions.

The pandemic pushed businesses of all sizes and across all industries to rapidly evolve to succeed in the hybrid work era. Here at Ultima Business Solutions, we also felt the pressure of these forces. We had to both look internally and adjust our own business to shift to a remote work model and look externally to ensure we were providing the right support to our customers at this critical time.

One constant amid the turmoil of the last year has been our strong, long-term partnership with Citrix. Over the 25 years that we’ve worked together, we have seen the business landscape shift dramatically — and perhaps never more than in the last year. The strength of our collaborative relationship has been instrumental to our success as a business and to our ability to remain a champion for our customers.

The Cloud Catalyst

One of our core focus areas at Ultima is in helping our customers with their cloud transformation journeys, and we’ve long taken a “cloud-first” approach. While we have seen interest increase steadily in transitioning to the cloud over the last several years, the pandemic and the resulting shift to remote work served as a “big bang” moment. It became imperative for our customers to modernize their applications and migrate from on-premises to the cloud, to empower their workforce to continue doing business effectively. In fact, we’ve seen 200 percent growth in our digital transformation work with customers.

It’s safe to say that no one was truly ready for this shift. But Citrix was critical in our endeavor to accelerate our customers’ digital transformation journeys. Working together with Citrix, we have been able to enhance our capabilities, standardize our customer experience, and provide significantly more value back to our customer base.

Technology Innovation

Citrix was uniquely prepared to help us address these critical challenges as the company has remained at the cutting edge of technologies from automation to networking and security. From its updates to Citrix Workspace to its investment in solutions like secure access service edge (SASE) and its recent acquisition of Wrike, Citrix has demonstrated its commitment to addressing the needs of customers today — and future-proofing their business for tomorrow. It allows organizations to minimize risk and enable their employees to effectively collaborate and work from anywhere, on any device.

We’ve been able to leverage the full suite of Citrix technology, wrapping these solutions around our customers as we digitize their businesses. We’ve been able to deliver end-to-end solutions to customers during difficult times.

We also use Citrix technology internally, which has allowed us to transform our own business. We were able to migrate legacy apps to the cloud and deliver them back to our employees to allow them to effectively work remotely — this has been critical to the success of our managed services business. In turn, we’ve been able to invest back in our business and grow our team.

The Citrix Difference

Beyond its innovative technology, Citrix offers an innovative approach to its work with partners. Citrix shares our customer-first mindset, demonstrating a willingness to help customers, a deep understanding of the needs of its partners and customers, and a flexibility that I have not seen elsewhere.

Our partnership is built on collaboration and transparency. Citrix communicates openly with our team to keep us up to speed on their latest technology innovations as well as their broader business goals, and we share a strong relationship with the Citrix employees we work with each day.

Building a Brighter Future Together

We are implementing the lessons of the last year to become stronger for the future. Looking ahead to the next decade of our partnership, we are excited to see more technology innovations and even deeper collaboration — ultimately allowing us to demonstrate real value on our customers’ transformation journeys and allowing us together to succeed no matter what the future holds.