Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online (Part 4)

SM: From your perspective, what is the state of the union, in terms of the connectors, that would allow you to realize the vision of deeper integration?

BdA: I would say newer, contemporary, agile services like Podio are built on connectors. Podio is itself is built on its own APIs. So, new services are already built with those connectors in mind. It’s the legacy stuff that is an issue. But there are markets out there emerging and we providers have built these connecting layers so that you can connect the newer capabilities like Podio to older legacy systems.

TA: Some of the conversations that we have had with big enterprises is that exact thing, where they know that they need to give their users much better interfaces to their old data that are on old systems. So, they see Podio as an extension of something they have already, which are the data. If you think about sales ledgers and P&L ledgers in SAP, then you want to give people access to some of the data to use that in a ways and fashions that they want. That’s where Podio comes into play. That’s a platform where you can modify and play with data, but you do it on a platform that is social.

We are not looking for some middle layer for us to become the connector. We can handle the connection ourselves because we built the platform as such. The more companies that you have coming out, their whole service architecture is built so that they don’t need a middle layer.

SM: The big systems that you are going to be integrating with, where the data sit today, let’s say one of them is going to be Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com architecturally is not necessarily a recent architecture. It is a cloud architecture, but it’s been around for a while. Can you help me with a use case of how you would envision sales people in an enterprise using Salesforce.com with the layer of collaboration that you are talking about?

TA: If I want to set up a sales conference in New York for all of my customers up there, and I want to plan that, execute it, get people around it. Then, as you go into Podio instead of a workspace, in order to get the data out on those customers, I would need a data feed in from Salesforce. So, I connect to an app to Salesforce and get that data, but I don’t necessarily have the data. And I might send it to you, and it could be either the next part of data or an ongoing read of the data. There are a couple of ways that this could be done, and we haven’t launched any of these integrations with other big cloud systems like Salesforce out there, but there are things ongoing. But we have the [capability] to enable some of this.

BdA: We also just announced an upcoming integration of GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining with Salesforce where it will be available through the app exchange. Yes, Salesforce is not built with a contemporary AP architecture yet to go through the app exchange infrastructure. It’s not very easy, but it’s doable. And Salesforce is a common use case scenario. The issue is when it’s not a Salesforce, and they don’t have APIs, so then we need to figure out to do that. It depends on how pervasive the systems are. If they’re not very pervasive, then you would have someone with an interest in developing it for themselves at the time. If they’re pervasive, then it’s something we can look at ourselves.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online
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