Andy Whiteside, founder and CEO of the Citrix solution provider, along with other executives tell CRN how and why sales are growing despite heavy competition in the space.
Executives with Citrix solution provider XenTegra said sales with the application and desktop delivery platform vendor are through the roof despite a number of smaller vendors and upstarts marketing themselves as a home for Citrix customers looking for alternatives.
“Our business is up 38 percent” year over year, Andy Whiteside (pictured), founder and CEO of the Charlotte, N.C.-based company—No. 327 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500 and a memberof the 2025 MSP 500—told CRN in an interview. “Business is good.”
The secret to XenTegra’s success is solution provider table stakes, Trevor Mansell, XenTegra managing partner and vice president of managed services, told CRN in an interview.
The company is acting as educator and trusted adviser, walking Citrix customers through the vendor’s Universal licensing launched last year and capabilities added to the Citrix platform since private equity firms took Citrix private in 2022 and merged it with enterprise application vendor Tibco.
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XenTegra And Citrix
“We are outcome-based consultants,” Mansell said. “Citrix gives us what we need to do that.”
Citrix and VMware spinoff Omnissa have been targeted by other technology vendors and their solution providers over pricing changes and efforts around longer-term customer commitments, with vendors including Microsoft-focused Nerdio, Parallels, Nutanixand Red Hatcircling the waters around the legacy virtualization vendors.
Fueling greater interest in the Citrix platform is the continued growth of Software-as-a-Service applications in every enterprise, plus Citrix’s comprehensive platform spanning app delivery, secure private access and even enterprise browser technology, a growing market for XenTegra, Mansell said. Citrix’s virtual desktop infrastructure technology is only one part of the story.
“It is a solution that people can’t replicate overnight,” he said.
Mansell praised the latest acquisitions Citrix has revealed as more ways the vendor is extending its platform.
In January, Citrix closed on the purchase of Unicon, the Germany-based provider of a lean operating system and management tool for virtual desktop endpoints. The vendor expects Unicon capabilities to play a major role as Windows 10 users get closer to the October end-of-support deadline and look to repurpose hardware.
In March 2024, Citrix revealed that it bought Germany-based Vast Limits, the company behind the uberAgent end-user computing observability tool, to help users with monitoring Windows Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 Cloud PCs.
Citrix has also recently unveiled more integration with leading technology vendors, including the ability to deploy Nvidia RTX Virtual Workstation along with Citrix DaaS (Desktop as a Service) and an integration with Google’s Chrome Enterprise Premium browser.
XenTegra sales director Jeff Olsen told CRN in an interview that part of the solution provider’s education work has been showing the value of Citrix as an app delivery platform saving customers from stitching together a variety of app delivery products for hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, public cloud, private cloud, legacy on-premises data centers and any other IT variety.
For customers that want a cloud vendor-neutral offer, Citrix is an option for quick shifts among the hyperscalers, he said.
“It just doesn’t have to be legacy Windows applications being delivered through a VDI session,” he said. “They’re going to get way more leverage, and they’re going to get way more economies of scale out of Citrix’s platform than they will out of seven or eight different point products that they will have to be jacks of all trade, masters of none, to manage.”
The permanence of remote work—even as a temporary option for organizations that have returned to the office—and the ability to scale SaaS products throughout an organization are some of what keeps Citrix’s platform relevant for customers in the long run, he said.
“We want to be able to give the right approach from an app delivery framework, from a security framework, from an availability framework that allows every application through the enterprise to be delivered through Citrix,” he said. “Citrix wants to be the conduit to deliver any application.”