The Citrix (and Podio) plan for World Domination!

I spent Wednesday at the Citrix Synergy2012 conference in San Francisco. There were about 6800 people at the conference, most of them quite technical, or IT people. I was also pre-briefed a week before on their strategy which now hinges on Collaboration.

Citrix Online, which acquired Podio about a month ago are the parts of Citrix that that I am familiar with. I think Citrix acquired a dynamic team from Podio. Learning more about Citrix its self , and listening to the keynote speech by CEO Mark Tempelton helped me to determine their plan for world domination.

Yammer and Citrix Extend Collaboration Brand

Today Citrix Online bought Podio, and Yammer acquired OneDrum.  In effect they were solving the same problem while extending their brands.  This is similar to what happened in 2005 when many of the asynchronous collaboration solutions (Central Desktop, Groove, Intranets.com, etc.) went through the same process only this time it is in the cloud.

Invisible Videoconferencing Glue

A week or so I got a briefing and demo from Vidtel. Scott Wharton is the founder and CEO of this small 20-person company based in Sunnyvale told me that they were formed in 2008 and launched their first product in 2009, with the current product just launched in Q4 2011. I began the briefing by asking "what is the problem you are trying to solve?"  Vidtel makes all video end-points work together, SIP, H323, Skype, Google, XMPP, LifeSize, they now all work together. Let's not forget mobile, Vidtel works on tablets and smartphones also.

TwitWheel Visualizing Microblogging Relationships

Almost a year ago I did a briefing with and a blog on TalkWheel. When I caught up with Patrick Randolph again he brought me up to date on TalkWheel and also told me about their new product TwitWheel. No, it's not a big wheel that you make someone you think is a twit spin around on, but it does sound like something Monty Python would make. Instead it is a new way to visualize the relationships between Tweeters or Twitterers (whatever is correct).

CloudForce 2012 and Collaboration

About a week ago I spent a day at Moscone  Center (SF) at Salesfore.com (SFDC) CloudForce event. Marc Benioff made some introductory comments stating at SFDC was on a $3B/year revenue rate. However SFDC, now 13 years old, encourages its employees to give back 1%.  They donate 1% of equity to charity, as well as 1% profit, and encourages 1% of its employees time to be spent on their own projects or on doing charity work.

MangoApps Again

 MangoApps 2012;   MangoApps was one of my top 5 year-end picks of 2010, so it has been a bit over a year since we were briefed by them. What started this was a mention of MangoApps at a conference I was speaking at in India.

Working alone or together

In a recent New York Times opinion piece by Susan Cain called “The Rise of the New Groupthink” she notes that solitude, the old solo inventor at his workbench in his basement or garage is now out of vogue.  Ms. Cain feels that the “new groupthink” is a popular new philosophy that says that creativity and achievement come from the interactions with others, in teams, meetings, and offices without walls.

The League of Extraodinary Coworking Spaces

I remember seeing the movie “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” with Sean Connery. I wonder who will star in the League of Extraordinary Coworking spaces?  The Invisible Man, to represent virtual space (he also was in the other movie), the Riddler for space of the future?  TwoFace for spaces that can quickly convert to something else? Well you get the idea.

Prediction 7 for Collaboration in 2012

7-  The Consumerization of Project/task Management: Consumerization of IT has been happening over the last few years, and even though this has had a big effect on CIO’s in the enterprise it also has had just as much effect on small businesses (SMB).  I look at a large enterprise as a collection of relationships, some of those relationships are to achieve a goal that is beneficial to the overall organization.  Like working on a new product project, it is a small team working on the project, but once done, the sale of the new product will benefit the whol