Cisco is placing a big bet on webconferencing—yes, even though it already has WebEx—with the $700 million purchase of London-based Acano. Here are the key details from Cisco's announcement, followed by Constellation's analysis of why it's making this move.
Acano’s hardware and software includes gateways, and video and audio bridging technology that allows customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments. This acquisition will accelerate Cisco’s collaboration strategy to deliver video everywhere, providing the best collaboration experience across every endpoint, every screen, every workspace, and to every user.
Today, less than 10 percent of the conference rooms in the world are connected via video. However, there is a massive market shift underway in collaboration – customers want the ability to easily connect from anywhere, from dedicated hardware endpoints to sharing video on a mobile phone. ... As the momentum continues, there is a need to deliver solutions that will connect any system, regardless of vendor, at a scale that is dramatically higher than ever before. Acano’s technology and expertise will enable us to accelerate our development in the key areas of interoperability and scalability.
Acano will help Cisco provide cloud-based video streaming to any device, thanks to features such as support for WebRTC, an open-source project that provides APIs for sending video to browsers and mobile apps.
The company has also tackled the scalability question through hardware appliances and virtualization; it's able to "connect tens of thousands of users and meeting rooms without compromising on the audio and video experience," Cisco said in a statement.
POV: Cisco Is Trying to Fend Off the Webconferencing Upstarts
WebEx, the long time dominant player in web-conferencing is facing competition from newer vendors that create integrated communication and collaboration offerings," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. New startups like Slack, Glip and FlowDock are creating experiences that integrate group chat and video conferencing, while companies like Fuze, Join.me and BlueJeans are also creating new online meeting experiences.
Potential buyers should remain wary, as Cisco has previously been unsuccessful in the collaboration market with tools like Quad and WebEx Social, Lepofsky adds. "Both were technically good offerings, which shows there is more to success than just good products," he says. "Cisco will need to focus on sales, marketing and building a partner ecosystem to in order to make their latest collaboration efforts succeed."
POV: Connecting the Enterprise
Cisco's high-level vision for Acano reflects other efforts by vendors, such as SAP's recently released Digital Boardroom, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. And both in turn seem to draw inspiration from projects like Proctor & Gamble's Business Sphere, Henschen adds.
"P&G worked with Cisco on the real-time video conferencing element of Business Sphere, so Cisco has been working on these ideas for a long time indeed," Henschen says. "The category is maturing into must-have collaborative experience for collaborating around business results and planning, with data-visualization as an enabler of data-driven decisions."