Citrix, VMware keep it simple

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18 October 2012

I have spent the past two weeks shuttling back and forth to Barcelona to find out about the future of virtualisation according to VMWare and Citrix. Well, to be more accurate about it, I’ve been listening to both vendors articulate their channel strategies.

One area that both vendors focused quite a bit of attention on, which was especially relevant from an Irish perspective, was the SMB market. Admittedly, their definition of SMB (any business with less than 1,000 employees) comes close to incorporating nearly every company operating in Ireland, but it must have gladdened the hearts of channel partners here to hear some specifics about the SMB market.

At Citrix Summit, Citrix UK and Ireland channel director Kevin Bland (pictured) candidly admitted the vendor had been perceived as "less than relevant" in the SMB space in the past but the release of its VDI-in-a-box solution at last year’s Citrix Summit and the creation of a separate SMB specialisation for its Citrix Solution Advisor programme had helped strengthen its SMB credentials.

And there’s no doubt it is gaining traction. Christian Partarrieu, director, channel sales and marketing, EMEA, revealed VDI-in-a-box was growing at 70% quarter on quarter. He stressed the SMB market was "a pure partner play" and VDI-in-a-box was "a very cost-productive partner play". There are 250 EMEA partners certified for SMB, including nearly all of Citrix’s high level Platinum partners in the UK and Ireland.

Six days earlier (and 7.6kms away) at VMWorld 2012, EMEA SMB director John Churchhouse claimed VMware had already "developed a massive SMB business in EMEA" that was the same size as its enterprise business, stressing that two-thirds of its SMB customers were in the sub-100 employee space. The vendor has also reduced the deal size qualifying for an additional 10% rebate for new customers from $10,000 to $6,000.

The good news for those selling into the SMB market, Churchhouse argued, was that smaller businesses tended to adopt virtualisation "with a velocity that you don’t see in enterprise". He believed the enhancements to VMware’s partner programme made SMB "an even better opportunity. We’ve created a lot of opportunities for partners to go after the white space" in the market.

Why all this attention on the SMB market? To a certain degree, it represents a natural technological evolution where vendors start by selling their wares to enterprise and then migrate products and features down to smaller customers. But SMBs rarely like to be treated as second class citizens in terms of the product being offered to them by vendors. Many of them bristle at the thought of being offered a "stripped down" version of anything, even though there is no doubt an awful lot of them don’t need the complex features and functionality contained in many enterprise products.

Perhaps just as important is that partners selling products and services to smaller companies don’t want that level of complexity either because it makes the product less cost-effective to sell and support. The simpler a vendor can make things while including as much relevant functionality as possible the better.

That, above all, is what Citrix, VMware and any other vendors making a play for the SMB market need to make sure they get right.

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