Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is a time not too far in the future in the use case that you talked about, Tommy, in that you want to organize a sales conference with a bunch of customers. You want to invite them to this sales conference, and you need to pull data from Salesforce.com. Potentially, the conference is happening in Citrix’s GoToMeeting environment, and that environment itself can become more social. Today, the social part of that environment is largely in the public chat function of GoToMeeting. But there could be a lot more social environment in that use case as well. Is that correct?

Tommy Ahlers: Yes, but I think we’re talking almost about our becoming a social platform that does the reaching out to customers. That’s not necessarily where we are. We are more on the internal collaboration on things or collaborating B2C between the customers and the partners. What we talked about before might have been a bit confusing. But we talked about Podio becoming that in point where McKettler’s strong or where Facebook is strong.

SM: Extended enterprise is not where Facebook is strong. The extended enterprise has to come from some enterprise platform providers like the Yammers and the Chatters and, in your case, potentially, an alternative to that, no?

TA: Well, then I agree. If we’re talking about the extended company, then I completely agree. That is the core use case of everything we do inside.

SM: Yes, exactly. How do you see this industry shaking out? There are lots of players right now. In infrastructure-as-a-service, like a file sharing, online backup, and so on. There are a lot of players right now. There are a lot of players that is trying to do enterprise social networks and enterprise social network platforms. How do you see this ecosystem playing out?

BdA: I would say that there are many players out there that provide some kind of social stream or a Twitter for the enterprise or Facebook for the enterprise. Honestly, we don’t see a lot of value there. And they will either go out of business or be incorporated somewhere else. The social fabric itself is value is zero these days. I don’t see Yammer or something like that … if they don’t evolve into a truly rich, collaborative platform, at the end of the day, usage will wane, and they will become a novelty that people don’t use anymore. We hear that all the time.

We just had an analysts’ meeting. Right now, when people use it in the beginning, there’s a novelty factor, and then they don’t use it again because the value’s not there. The point solution is great, but at the end of the day, point solutions do not survive very long by themselves unless they get some minimum mass, like a Dropbox or Box.net, and then you have all the smaller ones that will not survive on their own. The Box.nets of the world will have to evolve into bigger collaboration sites. I don’t think they can survive just by file sharing, honestly.

SM: At some level, it looks like the Yammers and the Dropboxes, like Box.net, they need to come together in terms of functionality, right?

TA: Yes. They come together as a platform, or they are getting acquired by a platform.

SM: From your point of view, you see your two acquisitions – Podio and FileShare – as the acquisitions that covered those two sets of functionality: the Yammer set of functionality and the Box.net/Dropbox sets of functionality.

BdA: Yes. ShareFile covers the Box.net/Dropbox functionality, but Podio covers much more than a Yammer functionality. Remember, we’re having internal discussions about how to enter this market. Clearly, Yammer is a bigger company with a bigger market presence, and we were talking about that. Someone said, “Well, if you could get Yammer for the same price as Podio, but with many more customers, with many more users and much more revenue, would you get it?” And [the answer is] no. I really don’t care about social stream. Podio is much more powerful. Podio is a collaborative work platform. It’s not a place where you yammer away. We did not buy a Yammer-like functionality. Podio provides much more than that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online
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