Further driving home that the company is serious about doing business in and being a meaningful distributor of cloud technologies, WestconGroup Southern Africa is pleased to announce that it has been appointed as an official Citrix Service Provider (CSP) distributor.
The announcement builds on the business’s stated commitment to the expansion of its cloud services, programmes to grow its cloud partner channels, as well as assist its current resellers in better mapping a cloud business strategy for themselves.
“We are firmly committed to the cloud and we believe that the Citrix cloud desktop offering is a quintessential platform for customers to be able to harness and take effective cloud solutions to their own clients,” states Leane Hannigan, director of Cloud Solutions at WestconGroup Southern Africa. “Additionally the CSP portfolio of solutions and offerings acts as the essential ‘glue’ for our reseller partners to package and bundle cloud services, either internally or through partnering with Westcon, to their own cloud offerings.”
According to Citrix, its CSP programme is designed specifically for service providers who provide hosted software services to end-user customers. The CSP programme extends to service providers the “right to use” Citrix products as the underpinning of their delivery infrastructure and gives them the flexibility of a monthly “active subscriber” pricing and licensing model. Service providers always have access to the most current versions of Citrix products available in the programme and only pay for actual end-user usage recorded during the previous calendar month.
Today WestconGroup provides its vendor partners access to an expansive mix of sales, marketing and technology expertise, as well as a growing base of established partners. The cloud practice within the Southern African office also boasts extensive experience in this market having significantly grown the Microsoft cloud, volume and SPLA partner channels over the last two years. Importantly partners of both Citrix and Microsoft will through their existing strategic partnership, benefit significantly from the new WestconGroup Southern Africa distribution agreement.
As a result of the announcement WestconGroup customers can now look forward to accessing rich hosted workspaces such as the Citrix Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS), application hosting and mobility solutions. These will enable their end user clients to rapidly develop and scale workspace infrastructures to deliver an end-to-end cloud-based experience for the user, all of which is user friendly, customisable, and that leverages the experience and credibility of a vendor like Citrix.
“I do believe that there were several factors that were key to us securing the Citrix CSP business. Firstly our established geographic footprint in Africa, secondly our established African partner channel, thirdly our financial stability and business integrity and fourthly our focus on strong logistics, sales and technical resources.
“However one of the key factors is that via our Security Solutions business practice and through our existing partnership with Citrix on other lines of their business, we were able to prove we are serious about their business, understand the importance of Citrix as part of a holistic cloud solution and that we already have access to a partner base that understands the business value Citrix can and does bring to their end user customers,” ends Hannigan.
Southern African customers can apply to the CSP reseller programme with WestconGroup with immediate effect.