Today Citrix announced the acquisition of Podio, an enterprise collaboration software-as-a-service company based in Denmark. Podio, one of our underdog startups to watch in 2012, offers a flexible platform that includes basic social applications such as microblogging. The twist Podio adds is a point-and-click system for quickly building simple social apps, along with an internal app store for sharing them. Customers can also use those custom built apps from a mobile device.

The enterprise social collaboration market is maturing. Social is becoming a feature, not a product – look at the Atlassian is integrating activity streams, comments and social gestures into its bug tracking and wiki products. Social collaboration is best when integrated into existing applications. As I’ve written several times, Podio competitor Yammer is focusing more on integrations with existing applications. Jive is moving in this direction as well. Other social vendors such as Qontext have focused on this from the start.

To this end, Podio includes out of the box integrations with Box, Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Evernote, FreshBooks, Google Apps, Google Docs, Google Alerts, Instapaper and Zendesk. According to a spokesperson, Podio will enhance Citrix’s “GoTo” cloud services with a collaborative work platform. You can expect Podio to become the social glue that binds Citrix’s GoTo line and other applications.

Yammer CTO Adam Pisoni has said that traditional service providers often shy away from social software because it’s not highly configurable – Podio’s advanced customization and rich integration potential might make it appealing to system integrators. CIOs should be weary of consultants over-customizing Podio solutions, however.

Other signs of maturity: Jive has IPOed, Yammer is on its way to an IPO, Telligent acquired Leverage software and Socialcast was acquired by VMware. Meanwhile, Salesforce.com has launched Chatter, TIBCO launched tibbr, Cisco launched Quad and SAP launched StreamWork. Also, SAP added social features to Sales on Demand, Microsoft is integrating social features into Dynamics and Oracle is integrating social features into Fusion.

Socialtext, Qontext, Newsgator and Telligent remain independent, but for how long?