Exec Who Led Citrix CSP Program to Lead Channels at Startup Tehama

The partner exec who helped launch the Citrix CSP program is joining DaaS provider Tehama as its new channel chief. Mick Miralis, who was director of sales and service providers for the Americas at Citrix, will join Tehama on Nov. 1.

Tehama’s Mick Miralis

Miralis joins another Citrix alum, Nabeel Youakim, who landed at Tehama in July as chief development officer. Youakim, who spent 22 years at Citrix, was VP of products and solution architecture. Youakim said he played a key role in the development and rollout of Citrix Cloud.

Now, Youakim is helping Tehama offer an alternative to Citrix, which is facing increased pressure from activist investor Elliott Management. Earlier this month, Citrix parted ways with CEO David Henshell. Tehama is a Canadian startup that offers a cloud desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) platform. Officials at Tehama claim that its cloud-native DaaS is a more compelling alternative to Citrix, VMware and other legacy VDI vendors.

Youakim told Channel Futures that most Citrix customers are still using its on-premises VDI solutions. While Citrix is encouraging its partners and customers to move to Citrix Cloud and its DaaS services, Youakim insists Tehama is a better option.

“It’s hard to do the Citrix thing because it’s so difficult to set up,” Youakim said.

“We can go into those with Citrix on-prem and say, ‘Put Tehama in the cloud,’” Youakim added. “We’re instantly available, and we can link customers back to the Citrix on prem. So, we’ll be using Citrix on-prem inside of Tehama where we can move that enablement to the cloud, have it up and running as a service where customers can continue to maintain their on-prem VDI infrastructure for as long as they want to, or they can move it up to the cloud eventually.”

Tehama DaaS Architecture

The Tehama DaaS offering is hosted in AWS. Tehama also recently partnered with Oracle, giving customers the option of running their cloud desktops on Oracle Cloud. Next year, Tehama hopes to strike an alliance as well, according to Youakim.

Tehama started recruiting partners last year when it hired Tricia Kelly as its channel chief.  During the summer, Tehama hired Terry Ansari, a former Adobe and Cisco executive, who also has worked with startups. Shortly after Ansari came on board, Kelly left Tehama to become director of channel sales at SnapLogic.

Miralis, who joined Citrix as it was launching its Cloud Service Provider (CSP) program, spent six years at the company. At Tehama, Miralis will report to Ansari, where his job is to expand its partner ecosystem. Considering Miralis helped expand the Citrix CSP program, Youakim said Miralis knows where to look.

“Hybrid work is here to stay, and as you are aware there are many DaaS offerings in the market today,” Miralis said. “Tehama is unique in their approach in delivering work securely and simply to customers and with partners. I feel there is enormous opportunity to deliver value to our customers. And at the same time, we can develop programs that will differentiate our partners and expand market opportunity with an exciting solution today.”

Miralis comes to Tehama from CaaS provider Star2Star, where he was executive VP of channel sales. At Star2Star, he helped form an alliance with Tehama. But the Star2Star strategy changed earlier this year, when Sangoma agreed to acquire the CaaS provider. Sangoma closed on the Sangoma deal in March.

At the time Miralis joined Star2Star, the company also hired ScanSource channel vet Rich Long, senior vice president of channel development. Long also recently left Star2Star. A Star2Star spokesman said Joel Poythress will continue to lead channel sales as the company integrates with Sangoma.

“With the new integration of the teams we have a full sales staff that has taken on those responsibilities.,” the spokesman said. Hence, Sangoma does not plan to replace Miralis or Long.