Three Things All Partnerships Need to Grow

[EIC_Alliances]

By Dr. Tom Bradicich

Great partnerships can allow us all to do amazing things. In business and in our personal lives, I’ve seen partnerships deliver results that would be difficult or even impossible to achieve individually. Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a great case in point, because our world class customer success is due in large part to our partnerships. We have many great collaborations, with many great companies, and in many industry segments. All for the express purpose of delighting our customers and clients.

But what makes a partnership really great? I think the HPE partnership with Citrix provides insight into the answer. Recently we’ve taken that partnership to a new and intriguing level. I believe this progress, and the partnership’s two decade durability, is based on continuous growth and moving forward in three key areas:

1. Product excellence
2.  Customer intimacy
3. Vision

Product excellence comes naturally in this partnership. HPE smoothly collaborates with Citrix because they value product quality so highly. Working in each other’s R&D labs, we discover together and continuously improve our offerings. This enables us to be joint first movers on solutions such as exploiting “ultra-convergence”, via the first integrated on-chip graphics processor VDI which greatly enhances the end-use’s workspace visual experience.

Customer intimacy also comes naturally to us. We work relentlessly to understand all aspects of our customers’ success, and then strive to go beyond satisfaction to sheer delight.

Concerning vision, we’re now growing to offer Citrix solutions on more HPE platforms in the data center, and in more market segments. Another key visionary example is Edge IT and the IoT or Internet of Things. It’s true the IoT has achieved celebrity status today, but there’s also real business, engineering, and scientific value in this trend to connect more and more “Things”. And Citrix and HPE are well positioned to help our customers realize this value. As we grow into this new space, we’re both innovating on our proven IT assets.

Together we are the IT for IoT and Edge IT. For example, Citrix excels in remote access to data and applications, via their XenApp and XenDesktop products. And devices, things, and the edge, are both new sources of data and are located in remote places. This is a nice fit for Citrix’s familiar battle-hardened and secure workspace mobility products.

Complementing Citrix here are the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge Systems which take HPE’s proven compute, storage, and systems management, and move them to the edge, right where the things and device are. These Edgeline Systems are temperature, shock, and vibration hardened, suitable for running powerful software stacks in locations outside the confines of the data center. What a potent Citrix-HPE combination --- familiar IT which lowers deployment time and integration risk in these emerging applications.

But there’s more. Citrix’s Workspace IoT initiative, coupled with their Octoblu IoT Services kick it up a notch. Octoblu can serve as a development environment and run time services for new IoT and edge workloads, all supported by HPE Edgeline systems and other HPE server platforms. This again lowers barriers to our customers enjoying new IoT and edge applications to grow their businesses.

Three essential elements. One great partnership: HPE and Citrix. Even industry authorities like Thomas Poppelgaard agree.

Next week, at our HPE Discover customer and partner event in London, I’ll join Citrix on stage to discuss more about our announcement of Citrix Edgeline solutions, our global IoT Innovation Labs, and just how seriously we take the three things all partnerships need to grow. If you’ll be at the event, stop by to look and listen:

Session Title: The Promise (and Peril) of IoT (Session ID: B12078)
Day/Time: 1st December – 9:30-10:30am

If you are not going to Discover, you can still find out about the great Citrix – HPE partnership and what it can deliver for you by visiting our alliance page.

Dr. Tom Bradicich is VP and GM, Servers and IoT Systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter @TomBradicichPhD