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.
More Insights
Webcasts
More >>White Papers
- The Oracle Insurance Survey: Overcoming IT Hurdles to Success
- The Case for Outbound Content Management
Reports
More >>[ Bring Your Own Cloud? See If Bono Loves Dropbox, Shouldn't You?.]
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.
