Looking to bolster its services capacity to handle growing demand from large enterprise companies across the Americas, Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTXS) this week announced the acquisition of Quebec’s THConsultants, a Quebec-based services organization and long-time Citrix partner.
Citrix has decided that it needs to grow its internal consulting team with the growth in demand for implementations from enterprise customers said Hector Lima, vice-president of field services in the Americas for Citrix. While organic growth is the main focus, Citrix is also on the look-out for strategic acquisitions and he said THConsultants and its 10-person shop was a good fit.
“We wanted small, bite-sized organizations that are already doing a lot of the things we do in our engagements, and have a Citrix background,” said Lima. “THConsultants also gives us additional language support. Being able to speak French is a huge plus as we don’t have those language skills internally.”
Lima said the deal also gives them a foothold in the area thanks to THConsultants’ intimate knowledge of the region. He’s also hopeful it will help with Citrix’ organic growth and recruiting strategy, as onboarding new hires at a sustainable rate has been a challenge in international markets for Citrix.
The team at THConsultants, led by founder Todd Hsu, will be integrated into Citrix and take responsibility for Eastern Canada and Quebec, although they’ll cover all of Canada. They’ll also service government clients and the top five financials. The existing Citrix services team will shift to cover Western Canada, an area where Lima would like to see further organic growth.
Hsu said joining Citrix feels “very natural” as THConsultants has been a very Citrix-focused shop for some time, and was already closely aligned to Citrix’s services business.While he looks forward to the new challenges being part of Citrix will bring, Hsu said he recognized there is much hard work ahead.
“They say be careful what you wish for. When you’re a small businessman all you wish for us to have every client in the world. Well, now I do so I have to figure-out how to manage that many clients and focus in terms of providing the attention every client truly deserves,” said Hsu. “That, to me, is the biggest plus and also the biggest challenge.”
While the acquisition will boost Citrix’s services organization, Lima stresses it will not put Citrix in conflict at all with its channel community.
“We have a very cohesive model with our partners in Canada and the U.S. We focus on the design and initial build-out of very large Citrix deployments, which is a small sample of clients,” said Lima. “Once we built it we have it off to a partner, systems integrator or the customer, depending on who will manage it. Even in large accounts we often sub-contract to partners, and that will continue.”
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