As we’ve all experienced in the last nine months, hybrid work brings tremendous benefits — and challenges. At Citrix, we’re laser focused on giving people the freedom to do their best work, wherever they are.

That’s why we’re so excited about Wrike.

In the first part of my interview with Aharon Weiner, Vice President Business Development at Wrike, he shared how Wrike mirrors our vision and completes the Citrix Workspace solution by managing the human communication points that can hinder remote teams.

This week, Aharon dives a little deeper into the Wrike + Citrix cloud use cases that enable teams to collaborate more efficiently and what partners should be listening for in customer conversations.


Aharon, we’ve talked at length about our complementary strategy and vision. Can you expand on some of the specific hybrid-work pain points customers are facing?

One of my favorite examples that businesses deal with every day are requests and approvals. In the past, we’ve all put up with wonky systems because we had workarounds. We could walk across the office and say, “Hey, could you approve this?” Then we’d wait for it to come back, and then maybe we’d stop by someone else’s desk for a third approval.

Meanwhile, our legal, finance, HR, and IT departments get requests all day long from everybody in the organization — some through email, some through Slack, or Teams, or even SMS. They’ll ask five more questions and loop in someone else. There ends up being layer upon layer of unstructured communication, all trying to figure out what, where, when and how. It creates a lot of overhead. But in a remote world, those sorts of nuisances can become acutely painful.

In this scenario, how would Wrike plug into Citrix Workspace?

One of the beautiful pieces about Wrike and Citrix is that requests, approvals and intake — and the information needed to fulfil them — are structured and standardized in the same place, allowing total visibility to the order of processing. No more going back and forth, asking for additional information, or wondering when or if you’ll get an answer. You don’t need to bring the entire business process to an approver. You can surface approvals from your system — or from five other systems — and with a click, it can be completed.

This is how our cloud solutions enable teams to access the resources they need to collaborate efficiently across any device or location. Not only will the company be positioned to deliver the future of work, but they’ll also be able to create unique opportunities to reach new users and unlock new revenue streams.

Let’s say a customer has traditionally delivered a remote desktop experience to their customer, and now they’re realizing how important the resident applications are. Are there any buzzwords partners should be listening for in those customer conversations?

The big buzzword that we are all part of, of course, is remote work. But another angle is human capital. The ecosystem has traditionally been focused on the infrastructure. But now we’re shifting to focus on the next part of the stack: processes that people do each day in this digital era. From the individual to the executive, how do people actually conduct their daily work? How do they ensure their businesses will not only continue running but also stay profitable?

Once you start listening, you’ll hear a lot of pain. We’ve talked to many CIOs in the industry who have all these pieces of technology, but it’s unstructured. Enablement becomes very, very hard in this remote environment. And the pieces are not connecting well enough to assure their CEO and their boards that they’ll continue delivering on their expected goals. So those are some of the things we didn’t listen to before — and now we must.

Lastly, a very important question. Please tell us a little about that incredible dog in the picture.

That is Poof, and he is my new sled dog from Siberia. He keeps me very busy and has been a great companion during this remote work time. He doesn’t understand what’s happening here in hot California. We need to take him to the mountains, so he believes that there’s snow around here!


A huge thank you to Aharon. Partners, it’s so important that you take time to really immerse yourselves in the opportunities for your customers. We are here to support, enable and educate every step of the way on how to start those conversations.

Partners, here are three steps you can take right now:

Thank you for your partnership! If you have feedback or questions, please drop them in the comments below.