Citrix Platform Flex opens a new services opportunity for channel partners

Centered on the idea that different workers need varying features and products to do their jobs, Citrix recently unveiled its Citrix Platform Flex secure access model, which takes a different approach.

With Citrix Platform Flex, enterprises gain the flexibility to pay only for the products and services their employees use, instead of per-seat pricing, which offers broader features at a fixed price, according to the secure desktop and application vendor.

With this “persona-based” approach, enterprises can get and pay only for the application features and access that they need for each worker at a lower cost compared with traditional per-seat, all-you-can-eat pricing.

Citrix Platform Flex brings together software, management, and infrastructure to deliver secure application access to customers, according to Citrix, including the management of desktop services, enterprise browsers, and zero-trust access.

For example, pricing would be different for a software developer who requires higher computing power compared with a securities trader who needs ultra-low latency for real-time decision-making, where milliseconds matter. In another case, a knowledge worker may need secure access to SaaS applications without requiring high-performance capabilities.

With Citrix Platform Flex, enterprises can use new “Flex credits,” which can be purchased in bulk, to provide needed services individually to each worker as they need them, according to the company. The demand for each service can then be scaled down or up as needed based on workflows.

Part of the new Citrix Platform Flex offering is Citrix DaaS Flex, which the company says is a persona-based desktop-as-a-service product that provides virtual desktops and applications to meet the needs of individual workers and their job types.

Citrix Platform Flex runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud, combining Azure’s integrated compute, networking, storage, identity, data, and AI services as required. This allows Platform Flex to use, start, and stop thousands of virtual machines as needed by customer workloads. Platform Flex is available across more than 10 Azure regions worldwide.

Shelly Kramer, principal analyst with Kramer&Co., told ChannelE2E that the new service takes a long-overdue approach in the marketplace.

“I see this as a licensing model rethinking that is disguised as a platform launch,” said Kramer. “Organizations have been paying power-user pricing for every user, and we all know that is not the reality within organizations. But while this approach is no doubt sound in theory, the real measure of success here will be on the adoption front.”

The new Citrix Platform Flex services will also have various impacts on channel partners, who may have to adjust to the offering and its effects, said Kramer.

“For Citrix partners, on whom Citrix relies 100% to deliver services to its customers … I see this as both an opportunity and a threat across the partner ecosystem, depending on their individual business models,” said Kramer. “For partners whose value-add is strategic advisory, migration planning, and application readiness, this is good news.”

But for channel partners whose revenue is built around running related infrastructure for their customers, “it is decidedly not good news,” said Kramer. “Partners are no doubt concerned about this shifting of service delivery boundaries, and I am guessing that they have some questions.”

In addition, partners who retool around persona consulting and workforce assessment stand to gain, said Kramer, “but there is a skills gap they will need to bridge. For partners who can own that persona definition work, things like auditing workforces, mapping user types to the right delivery model, and managing the Flex credit consumption strategy, it is a real opportunity. But that is a different skill set than what we are accustomed to with the traditional Citrix VDI implementation work.”

Partners who do not yet have these capabilities have every reason to worry, but they do have a chance to catch up, said Kramer.

“Now is the time to make this pivot and ensure their teams have the skills they need to deliver,” she said.