What Enterprises Should Learn from Citrix Adding Real-time to Podio

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Author:  Jim Lundy

Topics: Collaboration, Social

Issue:  Who are the collaboration providers and how will they evolve?

Issue: How will the social HCM market evolve?

Summary: Citrix announced new real-time collaboration capabilities for its social networking platform, Podio. This signals a trend toward integrating real-time collaboration and social networking in the context of business processes. 

Event: On Thursday May 2, 2013, Citrix announced the addition of real-time collaboration capabilities to its Podio social business platform. The new capability is called Podio Chat, which includes instant messaging, audio and video chat. The video chat feature will be based on Citrix GoToMeeting via a web browser plug-in. The audio and video chat capabilities will probably be added by the summer.

Analysis: After buying Podio in 2012, Citrix is taking steps to integrate its collaboration offerings. Real-time collaboration powered by presence in the context of social and business processes is a next generation collaboration paradigm.

Many enterprise social applications have traditionally been asynchronous and do a poor job of getting down into the flow of how people work. People switch modes between asynchronous and real-time work continually throughout their day. Real-time and presence enabling business processes in context can add richer and speedier interactions to deal with process exceptions.

While activity streams and microblogging have grown popular in enterprise social networking applications, the further they are away from real business processes the less value they have. Activity streams may enable incidental innovation, knowledge transfer and social interactions, but the true value comes in tying those conversations to actual business processes where the outcomes matter to people and guide their work. Without the context of the conversation a lot of activity streams are just noise.

Business and IT leaders responsible for collaboration should re-evaluate their collaboration strategy and make sure it is people-centered and supports how people work. Social collaboration tools must align with business processes and be real-time enabled.

This announcement moves Citrix into a new competitive position in the broader unified communications and collaboration space among major vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and IBM. A Citrix Podio social workspace will now allow contacts to be visible via presence whether they are internal or external constituents. This brings together internal as well as external partner collaboration into the same platform.

Citrix has to work on its integrations with major unified communications and collaboration incumbents such as Microsoft, IBM and Cisco that already exist in enterprise environments it seeks to sell into.

Aragon Advisory

• Citrix Podio customers should make it a priority to utilize the new real-time capabilities within business processes.
• Enterprises that are not Citrix Podio customers should evaluate it against internal business processes requirements as a converged social and business application platform.
• Demand your collaboration vendors provide a roadmap for planned business, social and real-time collaboration convergence in their portfolio.

Bottom Line

Bringing real-time capabilities to social collaboration platforms and business processes are a driving force for next-generation collaboration offerings. Enterprises should develop holistic collaboration strategies centered on people and how they work.

Related Aragon Research

• The Aragon Research Globe for Enterprise Social Software