Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get into the market? This is a tough place when there are so many players going at it with so many different perspectives.

Bernardo de Albergaria: Yes and no. Yes, because you have to position yourself vis-à-vis all the other players that exist in the market. Why are you different? But no, because of the very issue that they are so different and solve only one part of the problem. Then people realized quickly that it was not a long-term solution that would [work] by implementing a Yammer or a Chatter. It was not a long-term solution by going with Box.net because they would need something more coherent at some point.

We went into market with that messaging. That was pretty well received, and people bought into it that and started using it and upgrading and paying for it. More important, one way we then also secured a solid voice in the market on this was that we said, “If we want to create this platform, then it ought to be a platform for many different industries, many different companies with very different ways of working. We need to give a high degree of visibility to people that enables them to actually do real work on here.” That’s why and how we came up with the app market or the app builder concept where people can build their own workflows and data containers inside Podio. And we’re the only ones doing that. There are a ton of users out there who love it, embrace it, and see how that is a real and true productivity booster. Those apps are then tied in to the social platform of the SaaS platform at Podio.

When you go into a market that has so many players with a different angle, it’s easy to get lost in the noise if you don’t have a clear vision of what you want to do, and you’re not just a better version of something that already exists. I think we were clear on both of them. We’re not just a better version. We’re a completely different version. We have a differentiated vision about letting people build their own apps in this platform.

SM: OK. Bernardo, you decided to buy ShareFile, and you decided to buy Podio, so Podio gives you the cross platform harness to make all these things work together. ShareFile gives you the data sharing piece of it. What about the other pieces? In your current vision, what are the other pieces that make for a compelling cloud-based social collaboration platform or suite that you are offering, and how does that evolve as we go through the rest of this decade?

BdA: I think the combination of an open platform like Podio with its unique app building and app market platform, with the strong capability of ShareFile in conjunction with the real-time components of what we offer today, Web, video and audio creates –

SM: Of which you already have the GoToMeeting products, which bring together the Web, video and audio pieces.

BdA: Exactly. If you look at all of this, these are the main building blocks of an incredibly powerful collaborative experience. What’s now part of these building blocks is a combination of items outside of collaboration. We’re talking about other apps, other environments that are necessary to get work done. Those are not environments we want to necessarily get into ourselves. We’re talking about legacy systems, financial systems, accounting systems, CRM systems. Those are the things that are important in an enterprise.

What’s important for us is the ability to seamlessly integrate with those systems so that you can interact with all the data that is there, with all the capabilities that are there from anywhere, with a rich, contextual, collaborative experience. Further integrations are the keys to evolving these capabilities. It’s not necessarily other major building blocks. I think all the main building blocks are there. Now it’s a matter of integrating more and more and more.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online
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