INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
As large organizations grapple with adopting modern work practices without throwing out all of their legacy software, a company that works
with them is making an acquisition that it hopes will help with that process.Citrix today is announcing that it has acquired Sapho, a
startup that develops µ apps& for legacy software so that workers could use then as they would more modern applications: in the cloud,
on mobile and more.
We understand that the acquisition was for around $200 million in an all-cash deal
It a good return: Sapho had raised just under $28 million since 2014 from investors that included AME Cloud Ventures, Louie Alsop, Felicis
Including co-founders Fouad ElNaggar and Peter Yared, thewhole team of 90 employees, based mainly in the Bay Area and a development office
in Prague, will be joining Citrix.
Citrix, for its part, currently has a market cap of about $14 billion and has been seeing a surge of
interest under new CEO David Henshall, who has repositioned it from focusing mainly on virtual private networking services to a more hybrid
cloud model, following a wider trend in the world of enterprise IT.
Citrix will be bringing on all of Sapho existing business and products
The two companies already have a strong overlap in their customer bases, CEO ElNaggar said, and it was in fact several of those customers
asking for more integrations with Citrix services that drove Citrix approaching Sapho for this deal.
&The largest companies in the world are
using Citrix and have a massive hybrid environment where they need to provide a more engaging set of experiences for their employees,&Tim
Minahan, EVP Business Strategy and CMO of Citrix, said in an interview
&It doesn&t mean they will rip everything out and put in new software, and Sappho provides a great way to leverage that infrastructure and
make them more insightful in their decision making.We see it as a way to rethink the role that enterprise apps play in their
environment.&
Typical tasks that Sapho today provides integrations for by tapping into legacy softwareinclude expense reporting, sales
software, IT support tickets and HR tasks
It feeds data from these into services like Microsoft Teams,Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle EBS, Salesforce and SAP ERP, Workday, Google Drive
and more.
Ahead of Citrix buying Sapho we&d heard that IBM and Microsoft had eyed up the company and entered into early talks, underscoring
the work Sapho had done, the deals it was winning, and the gap in the market that it was filling.
