By David Le Strat and Jeroen Van Rotterdam

This week, Citrix announced the acquisition of Sapho, a leading micro app platform that enables a better and smarter work experience. This is an important step in the evolution of Citrix Workspace, and one that will help advance our vision of Citrix Workspace as a universal experience containing everything users need to be productive. Citrix Workspace will fuel superior employee experiences by organizing and automating work so it is more convenient and simpler to manage and by delivering insights that help people work smarter.

A Focus on Employee Experience

The employee experience needs to be redefined. Over the last 10 years, efforts to modernize legacy applications and to support a more mobile workforce resulted in heavy investment in SaaS and mobile solutions. These investments fundamentally changed IT and promised a new era for aging and hard to maintain enterprise applications.

As individual products, these investments made specific tasks and functions easier. However, as a holistic solution, they have fallen short of expectations and created complexity. Organizations make a wide range of productivity tools available for their employees, but adoption remains limited because users are unsure which app is the right tool for the task. Additionally, legacy data repositories combined with document cloud storage has created data sprawl, making it difficult for end users to find the information they need quickly and efficiently. This creates an interesting paradox: users have more modern tools, but productivity has not really improved.

Now is the time for change: to break down application silos, to simplify application workflows, and to reinvent personal employee productivity and experience.

And C-Level executives are paying attention. A leading analyst firm highlights that focusing on employees is an increasingly important priority for CEOs and that a war for talent is a crucial growth inhibitor.

Citrix’s Vision for an Intelligent Workspace

Our vision is to deliver an Intelligent Workspace that redefines the employee experience and radically improves personal productivity. Last summer, Citrix delivered on its promise to unify its portfolio with the new Citrix Workspace experience which provides employees with a central place to securely access their applications, desktops, and content on any device across web, mobile and desktop.

Today’s Citrix Workspace delivers secure, contextual access to apps, desktops, and data. The evolution of Citrix Workspace will continue to focus on creating an unparalleled end-user experience that:

Puts employees at the center and finds the right information from the right place to get work done.

Deeply integrates with business applications and leverages machine learning to guide employees’ work.

Breaks down business processes into simple tasks and simplifies interactions with business applications.

Embraces and tightly integrates with team collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and new modes of interactions like voice.

Why Sapho?

Organizations are undergoing digital transformation to deliver best-in-class employee experiences. By integrating Sapho’s technology into Citrix Workspace, those organizations will be empowered to:

Give employees flexible access to all the apps and insights they need to work where and how they want, and be productive in a single place.

Leverage innovative technologies such as machine learning alongside simplified workflows to organize work and guide employees through their day, automatically serving up tasks they need to focus on and the intelligence needed to get them done quickly.

Build employee skills and keep them on the cutting edge in their fields.

The Sapho technology improves personal productivity by consolidating access to tools, activities and tasks in a simple and unified work feed. It’s integrated with the way you work, available on mobile, desktop or your preferred communication tool like email, Slack or Microsoft Teams. Sapho integrates with leading enterprise applications and offers out-of-the-box micro-apps for applications such as Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft PowerBI, SAP Concur and more.

Integrated within Citrix Workspace, the Sapho technology will present a personalized work feed that prioritizes:

Important tasks and contextual actions to complete, such as approving an expense report, rating an employee or completing a travel request.

Insights about on-going projects, such as the latest marketing campaign results or sales pipeline trends, so users can get the context they need to efficiently do their work.

Relevant company communications, such as the latest employee survey results.

Details about activities are exposed as micro-apps that provide contextual actions.

Enabling the Future of Work

We are truly excited to have Sapho join the Citrix family and will be working to integrate their technology into Citrix Workspace. We believe that there is a tremendous opportunity to deliver a better smarter work experience for our customers and blaze the trail of the future of work.