Liquidware Labs, the leader in desktop transformation solutions, announced today that the company has secured the talents of recognized expert and 11-year Citrix veteran Barry Flanagan, who is coming on board to enhance the company’s global alliance program as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances & Systems Integrator Sales Strategy.
Flanagan is widely-regarded as an authority on both traditional and virtual desktop platforms. He has spent time in field sales, community and solutions marketing, strategic alliances, and worldwide sales strategy. Flanagan spent the past five years designing, enabling, and delivering alliance sales programs at Citrix that were focused specifically on the Citrix global partnership with Microsoft. These programs and processes led to significant growth in the joint pipeline and revenue for Citrix.
Flanagan has also worked closely on relationships with other major industry vendors such as IBM and HP. In his 11-plus years at Citrix, Flanagan contributed substantially to the community understanding of desktop virtualization and best practices. He also helped Citrix launch the official Citrix blog in 2007 and was one of the most read Citrix bloggers soon after the launch. In addition, Flanagan helped establish a social media presence by creating the Citrix Virtualization Technology group on LinkedIn with almost 14,000 members and a Twitter feed with over 13,000 followers.
“At the heart of every successful alliance program is a strong grasp of the needs and challenges of the customer,” said Flanagan. “Liquidware Labs is focused on inventing the future and removing the obstacles that arise for customers in the adoption of desktop virtualization and VDI. Liquidware Labs alliance partners all represent companies who are at the leading edge of desktop virtualization and who are also bringing considerable resources to bear on removing barriers to adoption and success. I am excited to join such a passionate and focused team at Liquidware Labs—I can’t think of a better place to be.”
Flanagan brings his extensive desktop platform experience to his role as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances for Liquidware Labs. Currently the company has extended agreements in place with VMware, Citrix, Dell, NetApp, EMC, VCE, Cisco, and Dell, among others, which encompass the use of Liquidware Labs products by these industry leaders as well as traditional joint go-to-market programs.
Many of these organizations have standardized on Stratusphere FIT and UX™ for current state assessment and deployment validation, and ProfileUnity™ for affordable user virtualization that delivers users’ personal workspaces in Windows native formats. Stratusphere FIT will be enhanced by the forthcoming release of Stratusphere Designer™, which will support rapid-image design. ProfileUnity will be enhanced by the award-winning FlexApp™ feature, which will enable support of user-installed applications.
Flanagan’s efforts will also extend to ensuring that channel partners are current with marketing developments and are designing their product portfolios and services with an eye to profitability and market share.
“We are extremely pleased to have Barry join our team,” said Chris Akerberg, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Marketing for Liquidware Labs. “Our goal is to bring the best talent available into this company, not only to further our agenda for rapid growth and expansion, but also to keep us in sync with the best practices and market direction of our alliance partners. Our mutual focus on driving innovation in desktop transformation to lower costs and boost quality will serve our customers best. We are confident we have an A-level player in Barry who will aggressively push this goal within the alliance framework.”