Citrix acquires project management platform Wrike for $2.25 billion

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 claims some notable customers, including Google, Dell, Snowflake, Okta, and Airbnb, and had raised around $26 million in external funding, but it was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2018 for a reported $800 million.

Citrix, a 30-year-old publicly traded software company based in Santa Clara, California, 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 enables them to oversee and secure all the devices that connect to its network from wherever they are, including controlling access to apps and files, and this appears to be the world Wrike will inhabit.

Future of work
The deal makes a great deal of sense, as both platforms are essentially built with the distributed workforce in mind.

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. This is pertinent at a time when remote work has become the norm for millions of people. And Wrike gains instant access to thousands more customers, with the combined company serving 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 soaring shares giving it a current market cap of more than $6 billion.

Citrix said the two companies will 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 post-acquisition and will report directly to Citrix CFO Arlen Shenkman. VentureBeat