This week, Citrix acquired micro-apps company Sapho to bring workflows for productivity third-party tools into Citrix Workspace.

Citrix announced the acquisition of the micro-apps/workflow startup Sapho based in San Bruno, California, for a whopping $200 million. Citrix is hoping to take an important step in the evolution of Citrix Workspace by bringing the modern workflow capabilities from Sapho to Citrix Workspace. This is the second acquisition in the Henshall era following Cedexis this past February. TechCrunch mentioned back in April 2017 that the momentum around Sapho had attracted the attention of the big guns such as Microsoft or IBM, but it is finally Citrix who signed the deal and acquired the leading micro app platform. Citrix follows the steps of VMware who announced recently the release of Mobile Flows for VMware Workspace One.

What is Sapho?

Sapho Logo

Founded in 2014 by Fouad ElNaggar (CEO and co-founder) and Peter Yared (CTO and co-founder), Sapho is helping companies understand that when employees are forced to use complex, hard-to-use applications, they become frustrated and less productive. Sapho Employee Experience Portal delivers a continuous user experience across enterprise applications, personalizes tasks and surfaces information when users need it most, and simplifies workflows that can be completed from any device, intranet or messenger. Sapho has raised $28 million and is enjoying rapid percentage growth (around 200/300% every year since 2016).

Source: eweek

Sapho UI
Sapho UI

Sapho currently has 20 customers and $10M in revenue. Most of its 100 employees will join Citrix at the Santa Clara location. You may think that $200M is a lot of money for a company this small, but remember that Nutanix spent $165M to acquire Frame and its $6M in revenue in August 2018.

Check out this link to have more details about what Sapho can do.

What does it mean for Citrix Workspace?

Citrix already entered the workflow space for Citrix Workspace with the announcement of the ServiceNow integration at Synergy 2018. With the Sapho acquisition, Citrix is taking this initiative to another level. The company is working to bring all Sapho capabilities to  Citrix Workspace Premium and Premium Plus customers using SaaS apps, and is hoping to offer micro apps building and administering services to enterprises. It is not expected for Citrix to use the current Sapho interface, but instead to integrate Sapho features within Workspace by adding a personalized work feed. This means that the current Citrix Workspace UI will evolve and put enterprises services into the spotlight with workflow/micro-apps.

Sapho integration with Citrix Workspace demo
Sapho integration with Citrix Workspace demo

You will be able to approve expenses, assign tickets, respond to notifications with quick actions, and see all your applications information directly from within Citrix Workspace. It is not clear at this time if Citrix will allow customers to build their own micro-apps with Citrix Workspace.

Virtual Apps, Mobile Apps and Desktops will still be present but the focus will shift to other customers who are not necessary using Citrix virtualization today. As always with Citrix Workspace, these new features will be available from all devices and all platforms.

We can expect Citrix Workspace to receive deep integrations by mid-2019 with leading enterprise applications, including Sapho’s existing out-of-the-box micro-apps for Microsoft Teams, WorkDay, SalesForce, Jira, ServiceNow, SAP, Slack, etc. Citrix will reach out to its customers for feedback in order to build connectors and customize the solution based on common organization needs. Synergy 2019 will probably the best place to show the progress made with the integration of Sapho.

The advantage of using micro apps with Citrix Workspace is security and analytics. You will be able to define a set of policies for your apps that will be automatically integrated with Citrix Analytics.

This news is also the opportunity to welcome back Nathalie Lambert who is currently CMO at Sapho since 2016 and was previously with Citrix from 2009 to 2016.

Wrap-up

The acquisition of Sapho shows that Citrix wants to take Citrix Workspace to the next level with workflow/micro app enhanced capabilities. The deal builds out Citrix’s vision for an intelligent Workspace and is a step forward making Citrix Workspace the default homepage for enterprises.



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