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The consequences of the job changes introduced by the pandemic have led to the emergence of a new and buoyant market.
With remote work becoming an obligation, teleworking and collaboration applications are going through a golden age, massively adopted and capable of moving billions of euros.
The most recent example is Wrike, for which Citrix paid 1,853 million euros on Tuesday.
But the most notorious case happened at the end of November of last year when Salesforce disbursed almost 23,000 million for Slack - for reference, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for about 22,000 million in 2014-.
The ban on what is set to become one of the wars of the decade in the technology sector has been opened.
With the purchase of Wrike, Citrix, specialized in
cloud
software
and network security, increases its service offering.
Like Salesforce, it seeks to carve a niche in the collaboration market through an application focused on digital work management, which also tracks projects that offers tools to edit documents in real time.
However, in this battle to integrate and lead teleworking in a single solution, there were already other well-known contenders, such as Microsoft's Teams or Adobe, which acquired Workfront in November for more than 1,200 million euros.
“Everybody wants to be in the digital workplace.
If you do not participate in this amalgam of collaborative solutions, you will lose an important part of the future that is to come ”, explains Miguel Ángel Morcuende, an expert in digital transformation.
The new context requires offering comprehensive tools to employees.
With a single click, deploy everything they demand.
Be it a chat with your colleagues, control delivery dates or meet through a video call.
Here is the battlefield where most organizations compete right now.
Where they want to position themselves as the undisputed leader.
“With the pandemic, every company is going to need a champion capable of boosting the digital skills of workers.
Able to create an intuitive and positive environment for them ”, he adds.
The health emergency has accelerated - and greatly revalued - a reality that was present long ago, although less transcendent.
The business war we are witnessing starts with figures such as the digital nomad or the increase in self-employed workers.
Little by little, the physical position has lost weight within companies.
“Now it is the great corporate world that wants to adapt to a phenomenon far from recent.
The Linux people, for example, coordinated through a forum and a chat.
The history of the Internet shows that a star application always appears.
In this case, at the time it was Messenger and now it's called Slack or Wrike ”, says Gonzalo Martín, CEO of Inverbis Analytics.
The data shows the impact of teleworking around the world.
Only in Spain, according to a study by Randstad, it has shot up 216.8% compared to the year before the pandemic.
More than three million employed people usually work from home when in 2019 this figure did not even reach one million.
Given this reality, the appeal of collaborative applications is evident.
“With the coronavirus, the workplace is where I want it and it modifies the tools that each employee needs.
We are changing the concept of work ”, Morcuende explains.
Constant evolution
The irruption of collaborative platforms is only one more evolution of a labor gear that changes at forced marches.
The redefinition of the concept of work, as Morcuende highlights, entails some derivatives, such as favoring artificial intelligence, automation, content, and
big data
.
Beneath these technologies, by way of integration, is where
teleworking
apps
play an indispensable role.
Around them a good part of the new professional environment is created.
"The trend is to concentrate as many solutions as possible with the intention of providing added value from data analytics and artificial intelligence," he says.
Regardless of trends accelerated by the pandemic, the global economy is watching the end of the era of
software
as a service (SaaS) —programs that allow users to connect to and use cloud-based applications over the Internet.
As much as it facilitates the creation of services and products remotely, it has ceased to be differential and profitable due to the saturation of the market, which has almost immediately prompted the approach to a technology such as remote work.
"The Slack and Wrike purchases are part of the breakthrough progress that lies ahead in the next 10 years," argues Morcuende.
There is still time to abandon the coronavirus crisis and fully understand all its effects, but the technological world is already immersed in certain wars that will determine which companies will emerge stronger from the upheaval.
And what almost no expert denies is that we are facing a new stage dominated by innovation, present in more and more sections of daily life.
“The spread of telecommuting and keeping people connected is accelerated by being confined.
Covid leads to the introduction, in one way or another, of this type of product ", concludes Martín.
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