We have all heard many times over that Citrix and Microsoft are the best of friends and the relationship between the two market leaders is all roses. Well that may be the case at the corporate level, but it's a completely different story down on the field level where "the rubber meets the road" and customers are intimately involved.
I was in Redmond earlier last month for some executive meetings with the Microsoft virtualization teams and the prevailing theme was the same, "our partnership with Citrix is strong and we are collaborating on many fronts". I called them to the carpet on that numerous times in meetings and gave them my opinions on how things actually work at the field level with my industry colleagues in the room echoing my sentiments. I also heard that same theme in Fort Lauderdale last month from Citrix and was thinking that they talk about this so much they have themselves believing it. Corporate folks at both companies are completely out of touch with what is happening in the field.
What is happening at the field level? Microsoft and Citrix have the gloves off and it's a slug-fest in the trenches. One instance where I was involved was where Microsoft actually brought Citrix into a pre-sales meeting. The discussions were going well and the talk was about Hyper-V, among other things, being deployed in this customer. Without any indication of what was coming, the Citrix Field Sales team proceeded to stand and step all over Microsoft and start talking about XenServer and why this needed to be the hypervisor of choice in this customer's environment. Needless to say, the customer was confused and looked like a "deer in the headlights". The discussion went downhill fast and the meeting ended with the customer frustrated, confused, and wondering why Microsoft and Citrix weren't getting along as was always talked about and that the message was so confusing. So what happened? The customer went with VMware and has since moved deeper into that technology.
The really bad thing is that the partners (insert name here) are always caught in the middle and playing referee a lot in these customer meetings. Partners are working hard to do the right thing for the customesr and are unknowingly bringing a ticking bomb into meetings by having both Citrix and Microsoft in the room together. The partners work hard to be that "trusted advisor" for clients, but this relationship is compromised when meetings, like the one mentioned above, get completely out of hand and the messaging isn't clear and there is contention among the vendors.
What can be done to remedy this situation? There are some shimmers of daylight peaking through the dark clouds and that is coming from Citrix where there is a push at the field sales level to get the SEs (Sales Engineers) more training on Microsoft's products in this space like App-V, Hyper-V in order to be better partners and be able to talk intelligently about what both companies bring to the table. I have heard that XenDesktop labs and Proof-of-Concepts be built on Hyper-V instead of XenServer to show customers that Citrix can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. I think a great step in the right direction. Since this involves both organization's field operations and sales organization folks this will be a Herculean task to get everyone on the same page and there will be those that just won't play nicely with others.
For the partner's sake, and more importantly, the customer's sake both Microsoft and Citrix need to get the field sales and engineering part of the relationship fixed as fast as humanly possible. Your reputations and integrity depends on it.
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