Sapho

Sapho developed a "micro app" platform that let employees interact with legacy and existing enterprise software through simple, single-purpose applications delivered in the cloud, on mobile and in collaboration tools. The platform automatically surfaced personalized, relevant tasks from existing systems of record and delivered them to any device, intranet or collaboration tool as a unified work feed. Details about activities were exposed as micro-apps that presented contextual actions employees could take to complete work without navigating the underlying application [2][3].

The product shipped with pre-defined APIs and a library of more than 50 micro-apps and connectors for widely used enterprise applications, including Salesforce, Workday, Concur, ServiceNow, Outlook and Google Drive. Typical task categories covered expense reporting, sales software, IT support tickets and HR processes, with data fed into or drawn from services such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle EBS, Salesforce, SAP ERP, Workday and Google Drive [2][3].

Citrix announced the acquisition of Sapho on November 15, 2018, reported by TechCrunch as an all-cash deal of roughly $200 million. Citrix stated it would take on all of Sapho's existing business and products and integrate the technology into Citrix Workspace to add "guided work" capabilities—making line-of-business transactions actionable within a unified, intelligent work feed [1][2][3].

Founding story

Sapho was founded in 2014 by Peter Yared, Fouad ElNaggar and Charles Christolini, and was based in San Bruno, California [4]. Fouad ElNaggar served as co-founder and CEO [2][3].

Business model

Sapho sold a cloud-hosted micro-app platform to enterprises, layering on top of their existing on-premises and cloud application estates rather than replacing them. A customer reference from Broadcom described it as a cloud-hosted app platform configured with ready-to-use connectors and APIs, deployed from contract to production in under three months [3].

Traction

At acquisition Sapho had about 90 employees, based mainly in the Bay Area with a development office in Prague, and a customer base overlapping with Citrix's; reference customers included Broadcom [2][3].

Latest developments

Following the November 2018 acquisition, Citrix described in an April 2019 blog post plans to integrate Sapho technology into Citrix Workspace so that line-of-business transactions become available and actionable through a unified, intelligent work feed aggregating actions, tasks and data across applications [1].