Citrix has allegedly made major changes to its partner program, and one of the consultancies briefed on the new arrangements said that when the news was delivered to a gathering of the Citrix faithful the result was “stunned silence followed by anger and disbelief.”

One reason for that reaction is a change to licensing for partners that, we understand, will see Citrix charge double the price for its wares unless partners pay upfront for a year.

Those wares will be bundled as “Citrix Universal for CSP” that encompasses “the best Citrix and NetScaler capabilities”, we are told. That bundle sounds a lot like the “Citrix Platform” license announced earlier this month for end-user customers.

A Citrix partner of our acquaintance described the license as “everything included including all the bits you don’t need.”

Citrix appears to have justified the cost increase on grounds that a “flexible monthly model introduces a level of incremental costs and uncertainty into the business.” The biz has also pitched the annual licenses as a way for partners to lock in costs and prices for their customers, rather than being buffeted by potential cost increases during a year.

The price increase will kick in from September 1, 2024.

Sources – who requested anonymity due to an ongoing Citrix relationship – told of the new bundle, and it has also appeared in a pair of Thursday Reddit posts that appear to reproduce the content of a letter sent to Citrix partners.

Attempts have been made to authenticate the letter, but Citrix and its parent company Cloud Software Group have not responded to many of our recent requests – nor to this one at the time of writing.

Among the other changes it is understood are afoot are a reduction in rebates paid to channel partners, leaving them with marking up license costs – and services, natch – as a source of revenue.

It is believed that Citrix did not inform all partners of these changes at once – some were briefed in recent days, others located in different countries haven’t yet been told the news.

One Citrix partner who had not been briefed on the changes told us that, if our information was accurate, he would likely quit Citrix and instead focus on Microsoft’s Windows 365 Cloud PCs.

The document we believe to be Citrix’s letter to its partners mentions “more than two million active subscribers today ” – some of whom will not immediately be ready to switch to Windows 365 or any rival desktop-as-a-service platform.

But between the changes we believe Citrix is making, and VMware by Broadcom’s spin-out of its end-user compute products, virtual desktop users have very good reasons to consider their alternatives.