Citrix Systems South Africa today announces a partnership with Business Connexion, appointing the company as its first locally based Systems Integrator partner. The partnership will support both organisations’ collective drive to facilitate enterprise- wide adoption of desktop virtualization and cloud computing. 

“We’re focused on forming the right partnership with well established partners that can facilitate the enterprise- wide adoption of virtualisation and cloud computing that we are seeing in more mature markets,” says Sean Wainer, country manager for Citrix Systems Southern Africa. 

“Services and Systems Integrator (SI) partners like Business Connexion have the ability to fulfil and support businesses at an enterprise level in multiple locations by delivering a complete IT strategy, taking a holistic approach to business change and technology innovation. This is paramount to delivering desktop transformation and cloud strategies that support the business and its objectives,” adds Wainer. 

“We are highly skilled and experienced in designing and implementing Citrix-based solutions. This partnership with Citrix will allows us to deepen our service technology offering, delivering an end-to-end solution from business strategy consulting to complete outsourcing  in a way that helps customers reduce cost and re-invest savings into other initiatives,” says Jacques Loubser, Group CIO and managing executive: Workspace Services at Business Connexion. 

“Locally, South African companies are ready to embrace cloud computing from an infrastructure perspective," Loubser continues, “but not necessarily from an organisational perspective. The main hurdle in terms of IT services provisioning is how to deliver services to multiple devices in a consistent and secure manner. Our main objective is to offer a consistent user experience which paves the way forward for the consumerisation of IT and a shift to cloud-based services.” 

Wainer says that virtualization goes far beyond consolidating servers or storage: “It’s about powering the cloud, enabling online access and collaboration from anywhere, and taking desktop computing to an entirely new level. IT needs to make a transition from managing equipment and systems to moving desktops into the cloud.”  

“Most immediately our focus will be to certify Business Connexion engineers across the product range, then to start to discuss with clients the benefits the Citrix technologies have in enabling Microsoft. Ultimately our intent given the market opportunity is to become an authorised support centre in South Africa for Citrix.” 

The Citrix Systems Integrator program is an invitation only programme. Partners to the programme enjoy joint solution development with Citrix, discounts for resale, outsourcing, hosting and managed service delivery as well as joint sales engagement and marketing collaboration. For more information: http://www.citrix.com/English/partners/programs/program.asp?programID=2305582