Citrix Buys Podio For Go-To Social CollaborationCitrix Buys Podio For Go-To Social Collaboration

6 Social Sites Sitting On The Cutting Edge

Get ready for GoToSocialCollaboration. The division of Citrix responsible for tools such as GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and GoToMyPC is adding the social software startup Podio, in an acquisition announced Wednesday.

Podio offers a freemium collaboration tool that in some ways resembles Yammer but with an emphasis on highly customizable workspaces that can include third-party cloud applications from companies such as Box, Dropbox, or Zendesk. Podio actually hadn't gotten around to adding any of Citrix to its list of integration partners prior to the acquisition. Citrix gave few details about how that integration will be accomplished, other than to say more will be revealed at its Citrix Synergy conference in May, in San Francisco.

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Podio launched its product at about this time last year and was one of the finalists in the Launch Pad showcase at last year's Enterprise 2.0 Boston conference. It also picked up favorable mentions in publications such as Fast Company for its approach to reinventing work. The young company had 27 employees, split between Copenhagen (where it was founded) and San Francisco. Among its reference customers is Twitter, which uses Podio to organize its merger-and-acquisition process.

Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers will join Citrix as VP of social collaboration, under Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and general manager of the line of business that includes both social and realtime collaboration products.

De Albergaria said Podio's approach to letting people "work the way they want to work" is complementary to Citrix Online's emphasis on reinventing the world of work by enabling remote, traveling, and home-office workers. "We started with Web, video, and audio collaboration, and now with Podio we can offer beautifully integrated asynchronous collaboration."

All of the integrations Podio has delivered, to date, have been for asynchronous collaboration tasks such as passing documents back and forth through Box or Google Docs, Ahlers said. The real strength of Podio is the ability of non-technical users to mix and match the platform's built-in functionality, or third-party functions such as document management, and stitch them together into a custom workflow, he said.

That makes Podio "not only a place you can talk about your work, but you can actually get your work done there," Ahlers said. "We made a platform to enable [workers] to go in and build their own apps to manage and organize any kind of work using that simple drag-and-drop tool," he said. Although it's possible to use Podio for formal project management, as for a software development process, it's also been applied to processes such as mergers and acquisitions planning and public relations campaigns, he said.

Larry Hawes, founder of the software industry advisory firm Dow Brook Advisory Services, speculated in a post on Google+ that the addition of Podio has the potential to "transform Citrix Online from a division that offers multiple, stand-alone collaboration tools into a cloud-based platform-as-a-service vendor."

In an interview, Hawes said he sees Podio as a visionary company with strengths that go deeper than an attractive Web user interface. "You get some collaborative apps, some project management apps, right out of the box, but if you like you can quickly customize those to fit your business process, your way of getting work done, either for your team or on an individual level. It's about bringing together different features and functionality in a way that lets you work the way you want to work," he said. Hawes suspects what Citrix is really excited about is the platform that enables that flexibility.

Podio's Ahlers said he sees Podio positioned at the intersection of three other categories of social software, defined as:

-- Social streaming products such as Yammer and Chatter.

-- Social portal products such as Jive Software, which put enterprise applications in a social context.

-- Specialty applications for functions such as project management (Basecamp) or employee recognition (Rypple).

As Ahlers paints the picture, vendors in all three categories are converging on the areas where they overlap. This is precisely where Podio has positioned itself--as a tool that includes social streaming functionality, social productivity applications, and a framework for bringing it all together.

Although at first glance Podio seems to put the greatest emphasis on project and task management, Ahlers said that's only natural because it represents "a core case where you need to set up a cross-functional team to get something accomplished in three months, but it's not a project that just happens inside sales, or marketing, or HR."

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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