Winning Citrix's 2026 Evangelist Partner of the Year Means More Than a Trophy

Last week, our team stood on stage at Citrix Unite and accepted the 2026 Evangelist Partner of the Year award. It was a proud moment. But as I flew home, I kept thinking about what this recognition actually means — not just for us as a company, but for every client who has trusted Altanora to guide their Citrix journey.

This post is my attempt to answer that honestly.

What "Evangelist" Actually Means

The word gets used a lot in the partner ecosystem, but I want to be specific about what it means to us.

An evangelist doesn't just sell a platform. An evangelist believes in it. They've seen it work. They've sat in the room when a Citrix deployment transforms how an organization operates, and they've had the hard conversations when something isn't working the way it should.

That's how we've always approached this. We tell clients the truth about Citrix — what it can do, what it can't, where the ROI is real, and where the complexity requires real expertise to navigate. That honesty is what Citrix recognized with this award. And it's the foundation everything we do is built on.

Why This Moment Feels Different

I'll be direct: there was a stretch where championing Citrix wasn't easy. And honestly, the reasons organizations walked away were fair ones.

Some found it too expensive, or had friction with Citrix's commercial practices and didn't feel like they were being treated like a valued partner. Others found the platform genuinely hard to manage without deep in-house expertise. Many were running it on servers in a data center and the pressure to move away from on-premises infrastructure was real. And then the cloud vendors showed up with a compelling pitch — simpler, cheaper, fully off-premise, hands-off. A lot of organizations took that deal.

We understood all of it. But we never stopped believing the platform could be better. So instead of walking away with everyone else, we got to work fixing the actual problems.

Those three problems — cost, manageability, and the lure of a cheaper cloud alternative — are exactly what we set out to solve. We rebuilt our approach around all three. And we went further, building our own Citrix-based cloud DaaS that is faster, more secure, and better performing than anything else on the market, with a superior end-user experience for even the most demanding workloads.

What We're Doing With This Recognition

Winning Evangelist Partner of the Year isn't just a title. It reflects years of work building answers to the exact problems that drove organizations away from Citrix in the first place. Here is what that looks like in practice.

We built FlexDaaS. Flexibility was a real complaint — rigid licensing, complex commercial structures, and the feeling that Citrix wasn't easy to do business with. FlexDaaS is our answer to that. Clients deal directly with us, on terms that work for their organization, with the flexibility to scale up or down as their needs change. No surprises.

We manage everything for a fraction of the cost. One of the biggest barriers to running Citrix well has always been the expertise required to keep it healthy. Hiring even one full-time Citrix administrator is expensive. And if you switched to a hyperscaler-based VDI solution, you still need management tooling — Nerdio, Ivanti, Intune — on top of the platform cost. We manage Citrix environments end to end for a few dollars per user per month, support included. The math is straightforward.

We built our own cloud. The promise of the hyperscaler solutions was simple: move to the cloud, pay less, get more. The reality has been different. Organizations that were promised a $45 per user per month solution are now paying $75, $100, or more once compute, management, licensing, and tooling are factored in. And for GPU-intensive workloads like AI and CAD, most of those solutions simply don't perform.

We built our own Citrix-based cloud DaaS from the ground up. Faster, more secure, and better performing than anything else on the market — including the hyperscaler alternatives — with a global footprint of XenServer-managed hosts designed specifically for VDI workloads. It is not a repurposed general compute environment. It was built for this.

We are seeing the comebacks. We are having conversations every week with organizations that made the switch, realized the total cost was nothing like what they were quoted, and are now looking for a better path. A cloud-native, secure digital workspace with management and support included, at a cost that actually holds up over time. That is what we offer. And the demand for it is growing.

One License. The Entire Platform.

Virtual desktop was always Citrix's core strength. But what has changed in the last two years goes well beyond VDI. Citrix has built an ecosystem of capabilities that would have cost organizations a separate vendor contract for each one just a few years ago. And most of them are now included.

ZTNA. Included. Citrix Secure Private Access is a market-leading Zero Trust Network Access solution built into the platform at no additional cost. Standalone ZTNA solutions typically run $10 to $20 per user per month. With Citrix that cost goes to zero.

Citrix has been independently recognized as a leader in the GigaOm Radar for Zero Trust Network Access, validating the depth and maturity of the ZTNA capability now included in the platform at no additional cost.

Chrome Enterprise. Included. A fully secure enterprise browser for all your SaaS applications, built into the platform. The leading competing product, Island Browser, is priced at $6 per user per month. With Citrix it is included.

XenServer. Back and better. XenServer has returned as the number one platform for hosting VDI workloads, and it is now a serious alternative to VMware for organizations evaluating their hypervisor options. For our clients running on Altanora's global hosting infrastructure, this means a purpose-built, performance-optimized environment that general cloud compute simply cannot match.

Unlimited NetScaler. Included. NetScaler is a top-tier web application firewall and load balancer — on par with F5 in capability — and it is now included in the Citrix platform at no additional cost. For organizations currently paying for F5 or similar solutions, this is a meaningful line item that disappears.

Citrix Secure Developer Spaces. Included. Citrix Secure Developer Spaces gives organizations a secure way for developers to work without storing code or sensitive data on laptops. Development happens in centrally managed environments, reducing security risk while speeding up onboarding and collaboration. For organizations using Citrix, Secure Developer Spaces extends the platform beyond end-user access to directly protect intellectual property and support secure, scalable innovation.

The Endpoint Story Nobody Is Talking About

Here is a question worth sitting with: do you actually need Windows on your endpoint if every application your team uses is either SaaS-based or streamed from a server?

For most organizations, the honest answer is no. And that changes the endpoint conversation entirely.

Through our partnership with Unicon, we help clients deploy a lightweight, Linux-based OS purpose-built for virtual desktop environments. It is locked down, centrally managed, and designed to give users exactly what they need and nothing they don't. The result is a device that is dramatically more resistant to ransomware and endpoint threats — because there is almost no local attack surface to exploit.

The hardware cost story matters here too. With global supply chain pressures driving procurement costs up, the idea of refreshing endpoints on a standard cycle is getting harder to justify. Unicon lets organizations repurpose existing hardware and extend its lifecycle instead. The device your team was going to replace next year can keep running safely and effectively for years longer.

Citrix combined with Unicon is one of the most practical answers we know of to two problems that are top of mind for IT leaders right now: endpoint security and hardware cost. And it is available today.

What This Means for Our Clients

If you're an existing Altanora client, this award is yours as much as ours. You pushed us to go deeper, demanded honest advice, and trusted us with environments that matter. That's what built the expertise Citrix recognized.

If you're evaluating Altanora for the first time, here's what I'd want you to know. We don't take mandates. We don't recommend Citrix because we're a Citrix partner. We recommend it when it's the right answer for an organization's actual situation. And when it is, we have the depth, the funding access, and the platform knowledge to make it work.

The 2026 Evangelist Partner of the Year award is a milestone. But what matters more to me is what we do with it.

Award-winning expertise. Real-world results.

We take the time to get it right. If Citrix is the right answer for your organization, we'll tell you — and we'll show you exactly what that looks like. If it isn't, we'll tell you that too.