Interesting comments on twitter....

They posted the CSP changes on Reddit, too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Citrix/comments/1be5t3n/citrix_csp_program_changes/

Do I understand that correctly, that there will only be one license for CSP available going forward, and all licenses that we know until today, will be replaced? ping @Ryan Gallier

I've been asking my rep for clarification and getting no reply. As soon as i know something I'll update the channel

Our German Distributor ADN plans a Webinar next Thursday.

He pointed me to the webinar. Lol. Yes, this bodes ill. Will the fucking corporate greed ever stop?

Nope...

I'll need time to digest this and I'm on PTO until next Wednesday.

@Ryan Gallier go enjoy holiday - I bet by next Wednesday a bunch of folk will have summarized it all for you so not a good use of your holiday poking around the bits of information coming out...

Thanks Rachel. Have a good week

👋

One distributor posted on LI that they intend to "focus on the value selling, not pricing"

IMO suggesting a move to NetScaler in a thread talking about a 100% price hike threat is a rather bold strategy.

Webinar is on the 28th. I think we'll all have some comments after that.

had webinar yesterday with our swedish csp dist , or whatever its called, they didnt have any pricing on the new hybrid, but they confirm its 100% increase in 6month if you want to stay on the "old" license. and they are having one-on-one meeting with each csp to go through the new pricing with us

Our Webinar with our German Citrix CSP Distributor is today at 10am. Let’s see what they already know.

Email from Citrix today. No idea about the new pricing thou..

"focus on value, not the price" LMFAO

Zero chance this isn't related to the bedlam at VMware right now. My guess is that they're taking advantage of the situation by doing this now.

ahahaha oh WOW

Does anyone else think 15% growth commit is fucking insane?

https://giphy.com/gifs/season-16-the-simpsons-16x8-3orif1FICBYgRwNWCc Citrix sales people after you commit 15% growth..

What happens if you commit and then don’t grow?

You get whipped by Citrix's CEO, duh.

Don't we all miss Mark now?

Honestly, this doesn't change my opinion of Citrix in the grand scheme of things. They're no better in this regard than any other, and I'd still choose them any day, every day over VMware or Microsoft.

For what they do, there's really no alternative, this I agree. It's still aggravating to be treated this way as a loyal client for over 20 years.

Definitely agree with you there. Maybe there will be enough pushback that they change course.

We had our Webinar yesterday. AFAIK the changes are maybe quite huge, but not as bad as I thought initially.

"Either option treats you like dirt" isn't an excuse for doing so.

@Marco Hofmann How much are your costs going up?

Can't tell you, as there are no price lists any more. The words in the webinar were: There are no partners anymore, only customers. Therefore, each customer gets an individual quote. No price lists. The price will be: All your costs from the last 12 months, including NetScaler, divided through your USER/DEVICES = Last price paid = Citrix Hybrid Multi Cloud CAL. Citrix Hybrid Multi Cloud CAL = ALL Features from Premium level (as there are no levels any more) + NetScaler (Premium) 1000 How do you get those prices? As every partner is a customer now, you get a dedicated sales manager. He/She will contact every CSP and define your individual Quote for Citrix Hybrid Multi CALs, based on the Last price paid calculation. CSP Cals are now worth 12 months instead of 27 months, and every 12 months you have renegotiate your personal price, based on your growth I could tell you much more, but it's weekend Biggest pain point is DaaS single tenant is now locked behind 250 cals, not 25 like before DaaS tenants <250 are mandatory to merge into multi tenant. Please tell me if you have questions or if I explained it strange (not native english)

thanks for the info @Marco Hofmann , we have been using citrix cloud gateway and 200 VPX and Citrix DaaS advanced version in multi-tenant version, going up to premium will be atleast 80% increase, and going 200 to 1000 will increase that cost with over 100% on VPX I see no other option than going AVD for us.

CSP? But thats the opposite of what we was told. You do not go from advanced to premium. There is no (immediate) price increase. You get the new license (which is like premium, but it’s not premium), and pay what you paid for the last 12 months. I did not say price increase. Or do you already know about a price increase I don’t know about?

Yeah, we are CSP. Sorry, I thought they force you up to next level, which would be a price increase. sounds like we will only get a price increase if we continue with monthly, and if we sign yearly, we would go down in price, as Netscaler is included now.

In my understanding the price doesn't change at all (for now).

okay, then its the same price for us too than, but we will need to commit to 12month, which we cannot do. Our customers are moving to intune solutions, we will not have any Citrix growth this year. we will get stinged with that monthly 100% price increase.

So you expect a decline in CSP licenses? We expect growth, but sloowwwwly. More like 5%.

yes, I would say 30-40% decline as they are moving to intune. 15% is too high, specially when you need that year on year. 2000 users, need 300 more that year, what if one customer leave during that year, and they are 300 users, you would need to add 600 more users that year.. 15% is to high for CSP if you ask me.

I'm sorry, but do you mean they move to AVD?

No 😞 more and more apps they are using are web based, so intune is enough for them For them Citrix made sense when the windows program was client<>server/sql based. and you needed low latency to be able to use it

Ah, that makes more sense. I was confused on how Intune replaces Citrix. We are in the same boat, but not today. Many of our Customers use Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009/2012 which is a Client/SQL Solution. But Dynamics 365 is a Web app, so that will go away sometime in the future.

wow, that's complicated. I was invited to a webinar on Thursday, and I will chime in and see if my understanding is the same.

@Marco Hofmann from my understanding Dynamics should work with little latency against backend. We have a customer with Dynamic Nav 2017, going to-do a POC with them. Intune and Global Secure Access against backend in Azure where the Nav appserver and SQL will be located.

CSP webinar now.

Yup, the same as my info so far.

They said it's going to be up on SalesIQ

How to lose friends and alienate people vibes!

This is just a really giant "Fuck you" to your client base. Trying to sell it under the guise of "value" and this is better for YOUR business is the biggest load of shit. This is good for their shareholders, and shareholders alone.

If they're making everybody go direct then I'd love to hear how they handle someone asking what happens to the margin that used to go to those partners. See how well those tap dancing shoes are tied 😆

I thought they wanted the smaller customers to go to partners because they didn’t want to deal with it, and that was where the CSP stuff came in

My meeting with my rep is on the 8th, and can give more specific information then, but I had a couple questions they did not answer in the webinar which were answered by my rep.

@Ryan Gallier From our German Distributor I already knew, that all Gov and Edu Discounts are gone. As it's not relevant for us, I didn't mention it in my short summary above.

I emailed him directly and asked him to meet. 🙂

How did you know who that person is? I don't know who my rep is. We are "small", combined around 1500 CSP CALs, and most of the time I only talk to my Distributor.

Um, great question, there's never been a time i've not known my rep.

I guess you are larger and are used to direct contact with Citrix?

i'm only 3x larger than you, so not sure?

Had a meeting today with our rep in Sweden. You have until September this year to decided if you want to continue with monthly or commit to yearly subscription. If do yearly, you get invoiced every quarter. Example You have 1000 license today, Citrix will check your average from nov 2022 until dec 2023. If you had 1000 users on average. Citrix will want you to commit to 1150 users, because they do 15% upscale or whatever they called it. You will get 15% ontop of that for free that year. If you dont add any users during that year, you will pay for 15% extra. if you manage to grow more than 15% you will save some money, as you get 15% free. They didnt want to say anything about year 2, but it sounded like he thought it will be 15% increase year after year. so for you @Marco Hofmann if u have 1500 users, you do yearly, you will pay for 1725, but you can add 1983 that year without paying more, but that means if true, the second year, your average is now 1800, they will want you to commit to 2070 If you do monthly the license cost will increase with 100%, the same with Netscaler, You have until Dec 2025 to continue with monthly, after that you need to switch over to yearly.

How much did your licensing cost go up?

We pay 8usd now, so 16usd per users from sept 2024

Let me rephrase. If you go with the new commit, how much will your license cost go up. eg. I was paying 5.45/license @ 1000 licenses, now i'm paying 8.66/license for 1150 licenses.

if we do yearly, the price stay the same almost, except that 15% increase. So if we had 1000 users paying 8usd each, with yearly we would pay 1150 users paying 8usd each. if we had netscaler, they would be free, so some csp that are heavy on netscaler will save money

This is where i'm worried. I have Government SKUs for 4.02/user right now.

okay, if they follow the same pricing for gov and non gov, and you have for example 5000 users, and you had exactly the same amount of users during all of 2023. They will want you to pay 5750 users at 4.02/user, and the netscaler will be free

yeah, we might work out. With the NetScaler being free that may be ok for us.

we are small csp, so we are just moving everyone to AVD, CloudPC and Intune this year,

@Daniel Viklund Won't you miss MCS/PVS?

We dont use that 😳

For our CSP stuff, neither do we.

I guess if we would have, we could use Azure Image builder as we are only in Azure now days

Looks like our true price is going up about 26%... That's not a small amount. What needed clarification was on the 15%.... I asked... Say I have 1000 licenses, our 1st year commit is 1150 licenses... Year 2, if we only have 1090 licenses, what's our 15% based on for year 2? 1150, or 1090... That's an IMPORTANT question.

Our rep didnt want to talk about year 2, because he hope that it will change, and they will not push a 15% year on year

@Daniel Viklund @Ryan Gallier Wow. I couldn't live with MCS in parts of our environments. Of course we also have static VDAs, but the bigger customers get MDT Master Images. I have a question @Daniel Viklund: How did you get contact to your sales rep for your prices? And to you both: Do you already have access to the new Citrix Hybrid Multi Cloud CALs? When I try to request new Citrix CSP CALs, I only find the good ol Citrix virtual Apps Standard or Premium.

@Marco Hofmann, we havent received a quote yet, only that the price will be the same as we had before. based on the average from nov 2022 until dec 2023, and +15 % ontop of that average. Which in our case will be bad as we lost atleast 250users during that time period, so our average will be higher than what we have now. Havent had a look and see if I can get access to the new license, as we have pretty much given up on Citrix. I like Citrix as product, but its getting to expensive to run, and for what our customer are willing to pay.

I don't know what to say. We still have to serve the typical use case: Several classic (legacy?) win32 apps, the rely on an app and/or database server and are sensitive for network latency. So we use Citrix to provide central latency free virtual desktops for office and remote workers without VPN. AVD wouldn't solve that use case, afaik.

We are 100% in Azure, so for us AVD will still work for the legacy app, like you say, the one that are based on client/server that cannot handle high latency.

Its mental this new licensing model, we've had two sizeable customers scale back so we need to renegotiate. Unfortunately our distributor doesn't really have much more information than us, and all the Citrix CSP people I use to know aren't in the job anymore.

26% isn't as bad as some vmware folks, but it's a LARGE uplift in price.

Yeah, if you running Citrix on VMware, you are not having a good year of you are incharge of IT budget 🙂

So true

We had another meeting with our German Distributor today. I try to list the facts I can remember: • They will get our CSP Quote from Citrix for us. • They will check if the price is accurate. • They will convert it to €uro. • They will handle the quarterly billing. • If there are small CSPs (<250) in Germany that struggle with the new licensing, they might hint them at us, so we can handle their licenses for them and guarantee our 15% growth. • The 15% growth is fix and nobody knows what happens in year two and beyond. • Based on their current experience, our personal CSP price will be very good, as we have only ever sold CSP virtual apps standard, so our LPP for HMC should be very good and not kill our customer base. • They are very eager to convince us to make more NetScaler consulting, as we now have NetScaler (Premium) with HMC, so we can sell business based on this license. ◦ To be honest I wanted to sell less NetScaler, as I hate dealing with the CVEs, and we only ever use ICA only. ◦ And with the upcoming feature in HMC to combine Gateway service with Strorefront, I hope for less administrative overhead?!! ◦ Source: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2024/03/14/citrix-2024-roadmap-delivering-exceptional-user-experiences-anywhere/ • We must convert our DaaS Single Tenants which are <250 into a single DaaS Multi-Tenant instance. That's a pain point I have to swallow. ◦ I still don't know, as I've never seen a DaaS Multi-Tenant instance, if they can keep their individual custom Gateway service URL, or if they will share one single URL among them.

@Marco Hofmann thank you - insightful

We are doing multi-tenant, you can split each tenant to have their own custom gw have a look at this design doco : https://community.citrix.com/tech-zone/design/reference-architectures/csp-cvads/

Read this carefully.

Yeah its pretty crazy, speciall when you are a csp, and let say you have 1000 users, which is based on 10 customer, in Feb you loose two customers, now your total is 800. Citrix doesnt care, you are suppose to pay for 1150 users that year, so now you need to get 45% more users that years, just to reach your quota, or you are stuck with paying for hundreds of users you dont have.. Pretty sure that in 2-3 years it will only be large CSP, that resell to some partners in some way, almost like Microsoft did with Tier1 and Tier2 for SP couple of years ago.

@Ryan Gallier Yes, I feel the same. But also powerless and helpless.

I have responded to the email with our firms disappointment. I asked if it was a mistake. If it's not, we should send a community letter to them

@Marco Hofmann We must convert our DaaS Single Tenants which are <250 into a single DaaS Multi Tenants. Does anyone have experience with migration or a good link for document? 🙏 The migration document from Citrix „Migrating Citrix DaaS Service from Single Tenant to Multitenant“ is very superficial and not written for practical use. 😅

I‘m on vacation at the moment and won‘t access my work emails. A few weeks before my vacation our german distributor promised to send us an official Citrix DaaS Single to Multi Migration Guide as we also have one DaaS tenant with exactly 25 users, which we must migrate. I didn’t receive said document before vacation so I can’t talk about any experience. It could be that it’s the document you are talking about.