Earlier this week The Citrix Blog had a really interesting post about their 25th anniversary and what they intend to do next.
Citrix puts a lot of value on their partnerships as well as the features they develop with these partners. That emphasis echoes a lot of what I’ve written about in previous posts (i.e. highlighting our work with Citrix , Oracle , Cisco , and others) about the work we have done with Independent Software Providers (ISVs) and partners over the last several years. Much of the work we do with partners is built on the documented API’s in our platform that allow ISV’s to build upon the value we provide in Windows Server. This can be seen in documentation like the “Remote Desktop Protocol Provider API” seen here .
In my role I am often asked the question: “What is the best way to partner with Microsoft?” My most common answer is to point to Citrix and explain the ways in which they have been a strong partner to Microsoft for 20+ years.
The Microsoft/Citrix partnership has been built on delivering customer value and has both deep technical and go-to-market aspects.
Microsoft and Citrix have long-standing heritage in Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) support (stretching back to the very early days of desktop virtualization), and our engineering, support and alliance partnership dates back to 1997.
Throughout our partnership with Citrix we have worked closely together to integrate our customers’ feedback and to ensure the products we build are best-in-class (e.g. rich user experiences, efficient management capabilities, and great TCO).
The impact of this partnership is undeniable: Today Microsoft and Citrix have 230,000 joint customers and there are tens of millions of users that rely on our joint solutions every day.
You can see me talking a bit more about this partnership in a video we recorded together back in February:
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The platform we’ve built together provides session-based deployments, personal or pooled virtual desktop-based deployments, and great remote applications. This platform is flexible enough for use in different deployment models, and powerful enough to meet the needs of a wide variety of scenarios.
An important part of this platform has been the particularly powerful Desktop Virtualization solution built by Citrix. This is something we discuss in great detail at CitrixAndMicrosoft.com .
The future of this partnership can be boiled down to one word: Busy .
The market is evolving, the technology is evolving, and tech companies are now in a position where we need to be building solutions today for the needs business will have in the future . This means that our work with partners like Citrix are more valuable than ever.
As I think about the Mobility trends in the industry , I believe that the need for solutions from Citrix and Microsoft will only increase in importance as more and more end users require access to applications across all of the devices they love.
We will continue to work with Citrix to ensure two critical factors: Great value that addresses customer needs, and a great experience for both IT Professionals and end-users.
The opportunity for growth and success with our partners is huge – and the entire market stands to benefit. I’m very excited for both the opportunity to work together, and the innovation and progress that lay ahead.