After its split from Citrix, Wrike announced new product features at its annual conference Collaborate. The first innovation announced is Wrike Lightspeed which will provide a platform with a streamlined user experience, integrated AI and a host of new features. Wrike claims that the new generation of its platform offers up to 45% performance improvement. The target is to enable teams and organisations to “Work as One”.
In conjunction with Lightspeed, Wrike has also introduced a new pricing model. Team Plan targets smaller teams within organisations, and small businesses, enabling them to take advantage of most of the features available within Wrike. The Team plan is available at $9.80 pupm and is available for teams of up to 200 people. It lacks some of the features of the next tier, including portfolio management, most of the AI features, and the workflow automation, resource management, and integration features are limited.
This new plan and platform are targeted at catapulting Wrike into the limelight. It brings its pricing in line with more of its competitors, notably Asana, Smartsheet and monday.com. It will be interesting to see whether it can start capturing a bigger market share.
Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research VP of Collaboration and Communities, noted, “IDC predicts that the market for team collaboration applications will grow at a 5-year CAGR of 19%. Collaboration is something people do together, but the right technologies help it inform and scale across an enterprise. In a world where work is more flexible, and we are blending workspace and workplace, connecting actual work to core systems becomes an imperative to grow as a digital company.”
Wrike Lightspeed
The Wrike Lightspeed platform is not an iteration for Wrike but the next generation of its platform. It was built on three values:
- Intuitiveness, the new platform aims to make using the platform simple, enjoyable and productive whether, when working alone or collaboratively within a team
- Versatility, the platform is configurable, enabling teams to adapt Wrike in the way they work as their business evolves
- Scalability, working as one successful organisation, will grow and expand with Wrike Lightspeed scaling to support a small team to a global multinational organisation
Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO, Wrike, commented, “Companies of all sizes are experiencing a downturn in productivity accelerated by a more rapid pace of work, unexpected pivots in business strategy, lack of resources, and employee burnout. Wrike Lightspeed is designed to tackle the most pressing business challenges and increase productivity through key collaboration, prioritization, and automation features. Our Dark Matter of Work research found that 86% of organizations are planning to invest in solutions with AI and workflow automation capabilities to create a single source of truth for work and increase efficiency. Our new platform delivers this today, helping our customers do the best work of their lives in a time where efficiency is paramount. Wrike Lightspeed is not only our biggest launch in two years, but the first one as a newly independent company.”
New and updated features
The Work Graph data model underpins the new platform. This enables the flexibility and connections that make Wrike Lightspeed impressively scalable, extensible and adaptable. The power of graph enables organisations to have visibility across the complex mesh of interconnections across tasks, resources and project portfolios. Even as organisations evolve, changing organisations and work structures, the flexibility of the graph data model enable it to rapidly realign with the new structures.
At first glance, Lightspeed provides a modern UI, with drag and drop features enabling individuals to work how they want to, reducing clutter on home pages or adding it again, as required, in the form of widgets. It leverages the recently released custom item types to ensure that organisations can surface their industry or organisational language to personalise the solution. Custom Item types have helped Wrike introduce new use cases such as Enterprise Service Management.
Building on this, Wrike has introduced Customizable User Types. These enable administrators to create specific security permissions for different organisational roles.
The solution is also scalable in terms of performance and add-ons that enable organisations to add new integrations and modules as required.
User Interface Improvements
Improvements to the UI include:
- Updated Board View presents projects in a Kanban-style board with easy column setup, subtask preview, workflow modification, and one-click assignments
- Updated Table View blends the ease of use of spreadsheets with the power of hierarchical work breakdown
- Updated Gantt View takes one of the most popular project management views. It delivers a simpler user experience to display projects in a timeline view with dependencies and milestones and shows the impact of rescheduling on the overall project
There are also new features for the UI:
- New Calendar View provides a weekly, monthly, and quarterly view of projects and allows teams to manage roadmaps
- New Analytics View pulls data together in a birds-eye view, allowing stakeholders to see a summary of any project or workflow
Nicki Batelli, Vice President, Social and Digital Strategy, Game Shows at Sony Pictures Television, explained how these new features have helped his organisation. He commented, “The different views are super helpful. We use the Gantt chart to understand all of our overlapping projects and timelines. It’s really valuable to understand the full scope of work happening against a calendar view.”
Scalability
The larger the organisation, the more complex the requirements. i.e. finance works differently from marketing. To address this challenge, Wrike has introduced Space Workflows. These enable departments of other business units to maintain and administrate their compartmentalized workflows, enabling even more granular Space administration down to each process and status personalization.
Wrike is the only work management platform that allows infinite scale utilizing automation, integrations, work intelligence, and security. Today, Wrike introduced Space Workflows, a new feature that empowers teams to configure and control their processes whilst integrating with the organisation-wide centralised configuration.
Damian Robles, Head of Solutions, Business Excellence, Region Americas, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, commented, “Wrike provides a flexible system infrastructure that is easily configured to meet our business needs. While there are differences in the use cases across our organization, we are all working on projects and are able to standardize globally on key functions, as well as exchange best practices in our implementation around the world.”
Another new feature that helps Wrike to scale is an External Requester Collaboration. This enables the organisation to work with individuals outside the license pool using Wrike. This is a smart move by Wrike as it will enable organisations to share the Wrike experience internally, potentially enabling Wrike to upsell licenses. Also, most organisations work with external stakeholders on projects. It enables them to work seamlessly in the same environment, which potentially avoids duplication. Again it offers external stakeholders a view of how Wrike works and the power it can bring.
Wrike already has several other features that help organisations to scale with the solution, including:
- A Data integration engine that pulls and pushes data from Wrike to third-party applications. It also supports workflows with specific applications
- Work Intelligence powered by Wrike’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. Wrike has recently added AI Subitem creation that allows users to quickly convert unstructured meeting notes, documents, tables, or checklists into actionable tasks
- Enterprise Security. In combination with SSO, Space-level administration, and Customizable User Types, Wrike’s Locked Spaces delivers security for customers working with the most sensitive data
Alexey Korotich, VP of Product, Wrike, commented, “We’ve spent the last few years honing in on three critical elements that drive the vision of Wrike and future of work – intuitiveness, versatility, and scalability. Our teams have been working hard to anticipate current and future market challenges so that we can fulfill our vision to deliver the most powerful work management platform. Wrike Lightspeed gives customers everything they need to work at the speed of light, providing the fastest way to productivity.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Iteration or revolution? There is little that is completely new within this announcement. Wrike has brought together several of its recent releases alongside iterative improvements. In doing so, it has delivered the next generation of its platform, one that it has been heading towards for some time. Some very interesting features have now surfaced. Space workflows, alongside the new security features, illustrate how a single organisation can deploy Wrike across its organisation, with less friction from different departments if implemented correctly.
The new pricing plan is not innovative, but it is a strong statement that Wrike now has a much clearer direction than it did under Citrix ownership. Over time that direction should become clearer, and it will be interesting to see, how the company evolves moving forward with its new Chief Revenue Officer, Brian Clark. Wrike is certainly making its mark again as an independent, but can its growth accelerate at Lightspeed?
