Taj El-Khayat, the Regional Director for Middle East and North Africa at Citrix, speaks to Arabian Reseller about the tech and market trends to look out for this year
How was 2018 for the industry and your company?
We just held our annual summit where Citrix employees and partners joined together, and we managed to illustrate Citrix relevance in leading the way to an intelligent workspace. We also witnessed the industry accelerating cloud adoption as well as the need for simplicity, consolidation and visibility is a clear urgent need.
What sort of opportunities did 2018 bring along?
At Citrix, we experienced a strong adoption in SaaS and workspace subscription. More importantly, our networking business is gearing up to support customers with their infrastructure modernization projects as well cloud migrations. We are center and core to our customers digital transformation journey.
Did you face any challenges in 2018?
Channel remains our number one focus. And our strategy to enable, engage and excite our channel will be taken to newer heights as we align with our strategy.
What were your key achievements in 2018?
Ability to build end-to-end solution using our complete portfolio – workspace, networking and analytics. Cloud and SaaS subscription saw high triple digits growth YoY. We were able to increase visibility and be part of C-Level agendas, while we achieved accelerated growth in Saudi Arabia.
What promises does 2019 bring along?
The Citrix long-term goal is a simple one – to be the preferred way to work for one billion people. By allowing all users to work on their terms, Citrix will help our customers achieve maximum efficiency, both on the individual and organizational level. We will be focusing more on customer success. We will be winning Networking with Hybrid-Multi. We will lead with Citrix could services and we will lead with general purpose workspace and go beyond virtualization leading the way to the intelligent workspace.
Do you see opportunities on the market with Dubai Expo 2020 just around the corner?
Of course, the market needs to be able to deliver services and access to data and application to any user, on any device and from anywhere. Dubai Expo 2020 will have several incoming organizations that need to have a fast, secure and simple way to deploy their services to focus on their main business and objectives.
According to you, which technologies will be in demand in 2019?
Cloud and SaaS will be bigger than ever – especially with the Microsoft data center around the corner in the UAE. Other tech in demand include network and application visibility, security analytics and intelligent workspace.
What will be your key focus areas for 2019?
Saudi Arabia will continue to be our focus along with UAE and Egypt. We will also focus on channel development, enablement and engagement, sell our full portfolio and maintain Citrix in C-level agenda, and transition our customers to the cloud.
What milestones have you set for 2019?
We want to transition 50% of our installed base to the cloud. We would like to increase our networking and analytics attached by doubling from 2018. We also want to increase adoption of the Citrix workspace by 100%.
