Citrix Online looking to court the channel

Citrix Online wants to reduce its reliance on direct sales and is putting a call out for reseller partners but has raised concerns that too few software resellers are developing consultancy practises.

The Software-as-a-Service division of Citrix has largely sold its remote desktop support or webinar capabilities, under the Go To My brand, direct to end-user organisations in Europe.

“I am not sure we can scale the business by operating 100% direct, we have reached a plateau and we need to sell through the channel,” said Richard Wolfe-Daimpre, director of corporate sales EMEA at Citrix Online.

Partners across Europe, included giants BT, as resellers had previously not seen the value in selling SaaS and were not geared up to sell annuity-based services, he said.

“In the UK the market has grown and evolved in a two tier distribution system but like everything times have changed and the middle man has to become more of an agent or consultant,” added Wolfe-Daimpre.

The IT channel would need to mimic the lead of insurance brokers who following the advent of the Internet started to focus on selling services and not product.

According to Gartner the SaaS market will more than double to $14.8bn worldwide by 2012 from the $6.4bn in sales expected this year as concerns of over security, response times and availability had diminished.

The software-plus-services model will be a “game changer through the industry” said Stuart Fenton, president of EMEA at Insight Enterprises, and some resellers would succeed while others would not.

“The role of the reseller is moving from reselling to service provision and that is a difficult evolution to make,” he added.

Resellers have traditionally been involved in the transactional end of the project and had two choices in the new SaaS world – invest in skills to train staff on selling consultancy services or work with a third party.

Tim Dickens, sales and marketing director at Trustmarque, said it was working with a third party services provider and planned to launch a range of solutions in the New Year.