independenceIT Wins Major Partner Victory Over Citrix With nGenx

IndependenceIT has won a major partner victory, converting a star partner of a competitor over to its Desktop-as-a-Service offering.

NGenx, a cloud-based application and desktop delivery company, has committed to moving its entire business to independenceIT's Cloud Workspace Suite (CWS). That adds up to 10,000 current seats, plus all new clients going forward. NGenx will use CWS through all of its public cloud infrastructure, and as the foundation of its various solutions through its partner ecosystem.

While the win is significant on its own for independenceIT, CEO Seth Bostock said, it also represents a win for the company over a Tier 1 competitor from one of its celebrated partners. NGenx was recognized this January as Citrix's Visionary Partner of the Year and has historically been a strong Citrix partner.

[Related: AppDirect Reveals New Reseller Management Service At Cloud Channel Summit]

"It really says a lot about what we've built, and it's obviously a huge win," Bostock said.

Citrix did not respond to requests for comment on the announcement.

NGenx President John (JD) Helms said that the reason the company is making the switch is because of the complexity and additional costs of Citrix's move to tie more things into its partner portals and offerings.

"Citrix is a great partner with us," Helms said. "They've done a great job, but with some of the complexity as they try to tie more things together into their partner portals and their offerings, there's a little bit of additional complexity that isn't necessary."

NGenx isn't alone, as Bostock said he has seen an "immense amount of movement" of incumbnet virtual desktop partners to independenceIT. The movement started in the first quarter and has accelerated throughout the year, he said.

"We are seeing a lot. We've booked a huge amount of seats here in the last few months that have all come from the incumbents in the space," Bostock said.

While nGenx evaluated other vendors, such as VMware, he said that it was often the same story, with all sorts of vendor certifications and expertise.

"It gets back to the complexity," Helms said. "Our goal is to take the IT out of complexity."

Instead of just savings on license fees, cutting back on complexity is where the real cost savings will be realized, Helms said. Especially for bigger projects, Helms said that it will be easier to scale without adding a significant amount of high-level resources and talent.

"We anticipate to scale and grow rapidly as a company. This allows us to do that without the overhead," Helms said.

Helms said that he has heard positive feedback from the few customers that have already migrated over to the platform. Once all of the kinks have been worked out, he said that the rest of nGenx's customers will be moved over as well.

PUBLISHED DEC. 3, 2014