Citrix Online to have 'referral partners'

Partners will now be paid by a vendor for getting referral
for business. At least this is what Citrix Online has in mind. The vendor, which
sells its products through solution providers, will soon launch a program
wherein partners who generate leads will be given a commission for the referral.

Citrix Online has three products for the Indian market:
GoToMyPC, GoToAssist and GoToMeeting. All of these are web-based access, support
and collaboration online tools used primarily by corporates. These are
subscription-based tools, which partners can buy for a year and then renew it
annually.

Currently, Citrix Online offers channel partners an upfront
margin of 25% on every new deal and 10% for contract renewals worldwide.
However, the same margins will not be provided to partners who provide the
company with referral sales. Explains HR Shiever, MD-APac, Citrix Online,
“These margins are for those customers who sell our end-to-end comprehensive
solutions. We are working out the margins for those partners who will simply be
giving us the leads for prospective customers.”

In India, Citrix Online is focused on the ITES segment
primarily. This is because call centers and business process outsourcing deals
with providing real-time assistance to customers globally. By using GoToAssist,
these companies can service their clients promptly using just a desktop and
Internet connection. “In fact, our applications can run on a dial-up
connection as well, though the performance is obviously not as good as that of a
broadband. This will come in handy for those clients how might be based in
remote locations, where the Net connectivity is poor,” added Shiever.

He revealed that Computer Associates is one such company
that was servicing its customers using GoToAssist. The call center executives
now use the application to quickly get into a remote support session, diagnose,
troubleshoot and solve the problem for the customer without going through a
long, verbal troubleshooting process.

Citrix Online is also keen to enter the government and
educational segments, and is looking for partners who can help it make a
breakthrough here. At the moment the company's go-to-market model comprises
several solution providers like Frontier Business Systems, Orient Technologies,
Veeras Infotek etc and it is talking to some of these partners to take its
products to the government and educational customers.

Shiever assured that Citrix Online would continue to
address its end-customers only through solution providers. He has ruled out the
need to have a national distributor, saying that the latter only provide
logistic support. “Since our products are sold on the subscription model,
there is no need to stock or ship it to our partners, which is why a distributor
is redundant,” he added.

GoToAssist, which is a support application, is the product
that Citrix Online is very keen on promoting in India, given its stronghold on
the call center and ITES market. GoToMyPC helps customers access their desktop
from any Web browser or wireless device. It is an ideal product for the SMB
segment since they might not be able to offer laptops to their executives, but
their workforce can still access their office PC from any Internet kiosk. The
product comes in both the corporate version as well as SMB version. While the
SMB version can also be purchased from the web, the corporate version needs to
be bought directly through the vendor's channel. GoToMeeting enables up to 25
members to connect and have an online meeting. It is an alternative to Webex and
one can scale up the number of member to up to 200.

VINITA BHATIA