Citrix completes the integration of the Sapho technology acquired this year into Workspace, and while Citrix offers many integrations with key apps out of the box, they also provide an SDK which will provide a rich opportunity for partners.
Ed Rodriguez, vice president and general manager of sales for Citrix Canada
Citrix Systems has announced the general availability of new AI features within Citrix Workspace, which represent the final, and most important, elements of the integration of Sapho’s technology into Workspace. The keys here are an intelligent feed and personalized workflows that make the execution of tasks more efficient. For Citrix channel partners, the integration of intelligence is a strong opportunity, particularly for the many focused and vertically-specific applications that do not come with out of the box integrations.
This general availability announcement completes the integration of technology from Sapho, whose acquisition was announced by Citrix in November 2018, with the deal closing in February 2019. While the technology was demonstrated back at Citrix Synergy in May, and some of the integration took place earlier, the intelligent feed is only now available within Workspace.
“While we demonstrated the intelligence capabilities at Synergy, none of them were actually integrated in Workspace until now, said Ed Rodriguez, vice president and general manager of sales for Citrix Canada.
Rodriguez said that this technology becomes a core component of the Citrix value proposition.
“For the longest time, we provided access to applications that end users needed, and then we layered in data back in 2011 with the ShareFile acquisition, so we covered data as well as applications,” he stated. “This last piece adds the intelligence. This is groundbreaking for us. There is nothing else like this today in the market.”
The intelligence takes the form of a personized work feed that prioritizes the important tasks that a specific person needs to complete, as well as relevant data about ongoing products or company communications.
“It works like a Facebook or Instagram feed, and includes notifications, requests for action like expense approval or a training certification that needs to be taken,” Rodriguez said. “It uses micro-applications which tap into core applications to extract the most common tasks and present them to the end user without their having to go into the application.”
Rodriguez said with that with something like SAP Concur to authorize travel expenses, previously he would get an email with a link to log into Concur, where he would look at expenses and approve them.
“Now the micro-app extracts the notification and presents it in a newsfeed-like experience, so I can approve it without going into the application,” he said. “The time saved is tremendous. This type of interface allows people to take action and not be disrupted.”
The personalization comes from the AI and machine learning in the underlying architecture.
“It monitors things in your calendar, and learns from them,” Rodriguez noted. For instance, if you tend to be a ‘Friday approver,’ it will learn that and send things to be approved on Fridays.”
Out of the box, Citrix Workspace now has over 100 pre-configured micro-apps with integrations commonly used applications, including Ariba, Concur and SuccessFactors from SAP, Dynamics, Power BI and Teams from Microsoft, Google G-Suite, Salesforce, Workday, Atlassian, Zendesk and ServiceNow.
Rodriguez said that many applications around specific types of workflows are not provided, however, and Citrix is providing an SDK that partners can use to easily address that.
“This is a huge advancement in terms of opportunity for partners,” he said. “Traditionally, they have done implementation services, design services and consultation. While we have built integrations for some of the most common applications, there are a ton that we don’t have out of the gate integrations for. So we built an SDK, which will allow partners to build intelligence into other apps to deliver that true rich workspace experience.”
