Citrix has confirmed reports from earlier this week that it is buying enterprise-focused work management platform Wrike, in an all-cash deal worth $2.25 billion.
Founded in 2006, San Jose-based Wrike is a project management platform sold to businesses through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, allowing teams to monitor and track projects, workflows, deadlines, and more. The company, which claims some notable customers, including Google, Dell, Snowflake, Okta, and Airbnb, had raised some $26 million in external funding, but it was later acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.
Citrix, a 30-year-old publicly-traded software company based in Santa Clara, provides myriad tools spanning cloud computing, servers, networking, and more. Among these is Citrix Workspace, a virtualization platform that allows enterprises to deploy apps and desktops remotely. It allows companies to oversee and secure all the devices that connect to its network from wherever they are, including controlling access to apps and files, and it seems this is the world that Wrike will inhabit.
The deal does actually make a great deal of sense in terms of how the technologies complement each other. Citrix will now be able to offer cloud-based collaborative work management tools to its thousands of customers, which include Deloitte, Hewlett Packard, and SAP, which is particularly pertinent at a time when remote work has become the norm for millions of people. And Wrike gains instant access to thousands more customers — the combined company will now serve more than 400,000 clients, according to Citrix.
Other players operating in Wrike’s space include Asana, which went public just a few months ago with its shares now soaring to give it a current market cap of more than $6 billion.
Citrix said that the two companies will continue to operate independently until the deal closes, which it expects to happen in the first half of 2021. Wrike founder and CEO Andrew Filev will continue to head up the Wrike platform and report directly to Citrix CFO Arlen Shenkman.
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