Citrix has just announced the acquisition of social business collaboration platform, Podio. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Podio is a social network for businesses that lets those who use it create apps to enhance the functionality of the service. We’ve compared it to a “Yammer with apps.” Founded by Anders Pollas, Jon Froda and Kasper Hultin, the Danish startup has raised $4.5 million in funding.
With Podio you can manage everything from expense reports to hiring, and instead of following fellow users, you follow “Spaces” where these things happen. You can see Frequently Used Spaces, Contacts and Calendar on the right, with an activity stream of all actions on the left. From here you can get to anything, even adding or creating your own task-specific app.
As mentioned above, Podio offers an App store, where users can add App bundles for specific workflow purposes like a CRM Management tool, Project Management tool or individual Apps like Candidates, an app to manage job candidates, Twitter, an app to monitor tweets and Bugs, an app for internal bug reporting.
“This acquisition represents an exciting new chapter in our collaboration business. Podio extends our ability to provide a simple, secure and ‘works for everyone’ collaborative work platform in this post-PC era,” said Brett Caine, SVP and GM for Citrix Online Services Division in a release.
Podio has also integrated with other workflow and storage tools in the enterprise including, Box, Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Evernote, FreshBooks, Google Apps, Google Docs, Google Alerts, Instapaper and Zendesk.
Citrix says that Podio will be part of the GoTo cloud services portfolio, which includes GoToMeeting. The acquisition isn’t too surprising since we know Citrix has been trying to boost its collaboration and file sharing offerings. The company tried to acquire Box last year, and also bought a DropBox-like service, ShareFile, last Fall.
