Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about where you see the industry going. I think the best place to start is the evolution of social collaboration. I think Citrix, along with companies like WebEx, did some of the pioneering work in online collaboration, which got us quite a bit farther than where we were in the 1990s to be able to do Web conferencing and mobile conferencing. This led up to easy desktop video conferencing. Social collaboration is the next piece that is coming into the online collaboration movement. Tell me how you see this all playing out.

BdA: Real-time collaboration started first. The convergence of real-time collaboration started with audio. Then, interestingly enough, video came before Web. We had convergence from audio and then into video and Web, and some of us providers put it together, so there was GoToMeeting and now HDFaces doing desktop group, high-definition video conferencing and, of course, others such as WebEx, Adobe and Microsoft, which had varying degrees of success. But then we realized that that kind of collaboration is very rich, very powerful, but we don’t collaborate all the time in a real-time fashion. How do we collaborate the rest of the time? We use tools to manage work, and work is done in specific applications such as Office Productivity Suite and maybe some project management, and then we collaborate mostly, I would say, through email.

Over time, we saw the emergence of many online modes of what we asynchronous collaboration. File sharing has been one of the first ones, of course. You have different flavors of that, with or without synching. Then we have the collaboration portals, workspaces such as Huddle and Central Desktop. Then we have the social stream providers such as Yammer, Chatter and SocialCast all these kinds of things. But what we noticed as well is that these are interesting point tools, but they started adding features to each other in a way to complement their offerings. People are adding some social stream onto that. Yammer is adding document collaboration and file synching. They realized that all these point solutions are not enough. Users are tired of jumping from solution to solution to solution to execute work and collaborate. We at Citrix realized we needed to provide a full collaborative experience that is not tied to real-time only. But how can we provide that?

The first step was the acquisition of ShareFile last year. That is a powerful platform for businesses to create file sharing. Think of it as Dropbox/iCloud for the enterprise. But that wasn’t enough. You still have to communicate and get into work flows that are outside of work the same as file sharing does. Clearly, that’s not done efficiently through email. That’s where Podio comes into the equation. I’ll let Tommy talk about how Podio fits into this equation and how we see the future of – maybe today we call it social collaboration, but it’s really work. It’s really getting work done. He can talk more about that.

TA: There’s not that much to follow up on here because the way that Bernardo laid it out is more or less how we position ourselves and explain Podio’s relevance. When Bernardo talked about the different ways to approach collaboration, and how you have the talk centric, you have the document centric, you have the communication centric or data centric approach.

People are tired already of jumping from one application to another application to another application to get their work done. They want to have more context and be more in one thing. That’s how Podio started out. We saw the need to have one place to do things. That’s how we defined ourselves as a work platform.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online
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