Avnet to scale up Citrix deployments in ASEAN

Avnet Inc., is expanding their long-time relationship with IT virtualisation and mobility vendor, Citrix. During an event with media and channel partners, Avnet’s appointment as Citrix’s ASEAN distributor was announced by Avnet Malaysia’s Country General Manager, Chiew Yue Lam and Citrix’s Regional Vice President in Asia, Mark Micallef.

Over the years, Avnet made investments to gradually increase resources to better deliver Citrix solutions; the first of which is application delivery. This steadily increased to now include end-to-end delivery of Citrix Workspace Services or virtualisation, networking, enterprise mobility and secure file sharing.

Investment into end-to-end skills and expertise

Chiew shared that there are now 15 sales resources to support their 600 active partners, as well as three solution architects and point product presales resources.

C.K. Hau, Product Manager, Avnet Technology
Solutions Malaysia; Chiew Yue Lam; Mark Micallef;
Jamie Lim, ASEAN Channel Director, Citrix Asia
and Wendy Kho, Country Manager, Citrix Malaysia

He had said, “The next important resource are solution architects whom we invested in to be able to do solution design. They work together with sales, as a consulting team to our partners, to help solve their customers’ problems.”

This is especially crucial seeing as how Citrix solutions can help optimise an organisation’s workflow and processes. Micallef shared how a local government agency had implemented end-to-end Citrix solutions, so as to give their employees freedom of device choices, while also enabling internal IT control over application access and application security for the whole organisation.

Avnet would complement their sales and solutions architect people with a delivery team that provides implementation support.

Specialised resources for partners to go-to-market

Chiew described that Avnet’s resources in Malaysia have grown by 2.5 times from what it used to be. “As Citrix gained more mobility (solutions), we ramped up (our participation), especially in the last two years,” said Chiew who also extended Avnet’s offer to help its partners expand their reach beyond Malaysia and Southeast Asia and to countries in Asia Pacific like India, China and Australia.

Chiew further described Avnet’s new partnership with Citrix. “Citrix and Avnet are joining forces to launch this new partnership that spans across Southeast Asia. In doing this, we are also introducing new channel programs that is exciting and rewarding for customers.”

Besides investment into skills and expertise to further enable their channel ecosystem, Avnet has also refreshed their technology of Citrix-related equipment which all their partners and customers can access to do proof-of-concept (POC) testing.

Citrix’s motivations

Micallef emphasised that Malaysia is a very important market for Citrix, having grown consistently in the past three years. He outlined reasons why this is so, the first being the extremely high adoption of smartphones in Malaysia. “This country is number two in APAC for smartphone adoption,” he pointed out

The second reason is the big amount of innovation, especially in sectors like financial services and healthcare.

“Why this partnership? Besides the long history of working together, Avnet is making aggressive transformation to the Third Platform.

“Ambitious plans need good people and their plan, investing in Citrix resources in Malaysia and around the region, allows us to work with partners to go into different segments especially the mid-market segment.”

Not to mention, the partnership gives Citrix enormous scale around the region.