Video conferencing isn’t the most fun thing in the world. It’s difficult to have floating heads join a meeting and not have them end up being the focus of everyone’s attention.
Cisco might not be able to fix that but the company is seeking to improve the interoperability and collaborative aspects of video conferencing with its latest acquisition.
Cisco is buying London-based software firm Acano for about $700 million in the hopes of being better equipped to address the growing market for easier and scalable video collaboration platforms.
By Cisco’s own estimate, only IP video traffic will account for 80 percent of all global internet traffic by 2019. But right now enterprise workplaces aren’t ready to contribute to the boom, with just 10 percent of the conference rooms in the world connected via video and only 1 percent of users have video systems on their desktop, according to a Cisco press release.
But Cisco is already seeing growth in its current collaboration business and wants to keep up the momentum.
“People, companies and organizations are more geographically dispersed than ever before, and collaboration is essential to helping teams increase productivity and drive growth,” Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Corporate Development, said in a statement. “Acano’s innovations make it easier for customers to collaborate when, where and how they want. Together, we will help our customers to extend collaboration to every room, every screen and every user.”
Specifically, Cisco wants to leverage Acano’s hardware (i.e. gateways) and software (i.e. video and audio bridging technology) to build video systems accommodating of different vendors’ endpoints and systems within both cloud and hybrid models.
The Acano acquisition will also contribute to enhanced support for Microsoft’s proprietary protocols and mobile browsers through WebRTC support.
Cisco also says that Acano’s work has helped address the challenges around scaling collaboration systems by offering both dedicated hardware appliances and virtualized software options.
Cisco expected the transaction to close in the third quarter of its fiscal 2016. After that, the Acano team will join the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group led by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager.