Breaking Down Partner Programs

Sean Donahue, Senior Director, Global Alliance Marketing

Some technology partner programs may be just a label — but others are major accomplishments

Hello. My name is Sean Donahue and I am the new guy here at RES starting on a brilliant team doing marketing for some really stellar products.  OK, enough of the pandering to my new boss.

I had planned my very first blog post as an RES employee to be around the technology and the value things like RES Dynamic Desktop Studio brings to the diverse world of desktop virtualization projects in managing User Persona. But I noticed recently that there is a lot of static coming across the wires lately about different vendors’ partner programs. Since my background for the past four years was in starting and running the partner program for Microsoft MDOP (App-V) as part of SCA (System Center Alliances) I thought I’d jump right in and try to shine some light on exactly what it means to be in a partner program.

You see, every major vendor has partner programs and in the case of some of the biggest players they have a myriad of partner programs. Be it labeled “Managed Partner”, “Gold Partner”, “Alliance Partner”, or whatever, each program has its own set of benefits for the “partner” in the program.  Most of the benefits are sales and marketing tools to help connect customers to the solutions of the partners. In fact, in some cases the requirement to be a part of the program is a sales number and nothing more. If nothing else the “partner” is assured a quote that can be attributed to an executive that they can include in a press release announcing their “membership” to this partner program.

Here at RES we are members of all the typical partner programs, and we reap the sales and marketing benefits of them. However, what I was actually taken back by was the recently announced inclusion of RES in an exclusive program from Citrix. In my years of managing the Citrix relationship for Microsoft, I had never heard of this program— that’s how exclusive it is. What does it mean though? That’s the big question. Unlike so many other programs, it is far above and beyond the typical sales and marketing benefits. This status means that the leadership team at Citrix sees significant value in RES and the solutions we offer. It means a forging of a much closer relationship between leadership teams, but also a commitment to have engineering teams work together to create solutions that bring even greater value to our mutual customers.

I am very excited about this change in the level of partnership with Citrix. I think it will mean a great deal for RES and our customers, as well as Citrix. I also have a high degree of confidence that the leadership team at Citrix will keep this program very exclusive so that only the partners that offer real value in desktop virtualization and with the  strongest  technology have this level of access.

Like I said, the other partner programs we’re involved in bring their own set of benefits, and we in the industry will always buy into them, but this elevation is so impactful that I was moved to make it my first ever RES blog. I look forward to being a regular contributor to the RES blogosphere.