Citrix Extends Social Collaboration With Podio Purchase

Citrix is enhancing its social collaboration cloud service with the acquisition of a Danish company.

Citrix revealed 11 April that it has acquired Podio, a company that provides cloud-based work-collaboration software that runs as a social network inside small and midsize enterprises.

Collaboration Platform

Citrix, which recently has been adding new cloud services but is best-known for its virtual desktop infrastructure products and services, said it bought the privately held company to upgrade its cloud-related application options for small and midsize businesses (SMBs).

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Podio is little-known in the United States, but will get some attention now that it is part of Santa Clara, California-based Citrix.

Podio provides real-time status updates and features the ability to link to, share, manage tasks, comment and give feedback inside business processes. Using these status updates, teams can manage all kinds of business processes and associated workflows using preassembled apps from Podio’s free app market. Go here to explore the market.

Integration Capabilities

In addition, Podio’s collaborative work platform integrates, or can be embedded, into other services that serve as standards in various markets. These include traditional enterprise or business software (such as PowerPoint, Word and Excel) as well as cloud-based data storage, online collaboration and content tools. Examples include Box, SugarSync, Campaign Monitor, Evault, Dropbox, Evernote, FreshBooks, Google Apps, Google Docs, Instapaper and Zendesk.

“Citrix can help us scale to meet demand at a speed that would not be possible otherwise,”  Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers said.

Citrix said it will reveal more of its plans for Podio and collaboration strategy at the Synergy conference in San Francisco 9-11 May.

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