You'd think once a company has your money that they wouldn't care who delivers the product to your door, but a Citrix customer recently found differently. Rather than being able to get the licensing key he needed from the authorized reseller of his choice, he was forced to grant a sales visit to the reseller Citrix wants him to use.
"I have purchased an upgrade and renewed my support for Citrix Presentation Server," the reader wrote while his struggle with Citrix was on-going. "I am upgrading from Citrix MetaFrame XPs with Feature Release 2, and I'm also placing this on a new server. Citrix has informed me that to install the licenses on the new server, I have to transfer them from the old server, effectively inactivating my old server. This is not an option. I need to test the new server for at least a couple of weeks to ensure that everything works properly before going live."
Citrix told the reader that his alternative was to get a key that would be good for a 90-day evaluation trial. He agreed to that, but days later the promised evaluation key had not arrived.
"I called Citrix and found that my case had been closed," the reader wrote. "They reopened it and I had to go through the same process again. This time, after four more days, I get a call from a company that appears to be some kind of consulting firm that works with Citrix. I do not have time to waste with a consulting firm. I am already a week behind in this project and I just want my evaluation key immediately. I told them this and they said that they would get back to me. Right now, I am on the phone with Citrix again, on hold. When I called, I found that my case was again closed. The rep has had me on hold for quite some time now."
The reader continued to wrestle with Citrix licensing staff and technical support over how he could get his evaluation key for several more days. At one point, he was told his regular vendor - a national reseller -- could get him the evaluation version, which was exactly what he wanted. But it turned out Citrix would not provide it to the reseller either. The reader's choice, Citrix made it clear, was to go live with the upgrade untested or deal with the local consulting firm Citrix was pushing.
"The consulting firm obviously thought they were going to get a sale out of it, but I made it clear to them the licenses were already purchased and we only needed the key," the reader wrote after finally receiving the evaluation key. "They brought the key here this morning, and I had to listen to a 20-minute sales pitch. By their own admission, what they get out of this is a silent sales lead. They are the local Citrix Gold partner. My reseller is a national supplier and has more competitive prices, but Citrix's margins are probably not as high with them as with the local consultant. It looks like Citrix is trying to push us to local distributors since they cost more and Citrix can get a bigger slice of the profits."
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