Last week, Cisco (News - Alert) announced the acquisition of startup WebRTC/HTML5 collaboration firm Assemblage; this will help the worldwide leader in networking capture the ongoing market transitions of mobility, cloud and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Each of these has driven an acceleration in consumer technology so quickly and rapidly that our expectations of the tools we use to collaborate have changed.
Cisco will use products by Assemblage to dive into the growing market of enterprise collaboration. The tools provided will focus on aiding the revolution affecting workplace collaboration; the use of these new products are aimed to benefit enterprises that increasingly lean on smartphones and tablets as productivity devices to engage in coordinated browsing (co-browsing).
Although the financial terms of the acquirement were not disclosed to the media, what is known, instead, is how the acquisition of San Francisco-based Assemblage, a provider of cloud-based collaboration applications, helps Cisco turn up the heat against collaboration competitors, said Brian Kinne, chief technology officer and vice president of digital media at Cleveland-based Cisco partner MCPc. He explains that “buying Assemblage suggests Cisco is looking to broaden its reach in the collaboration arena and start complementing some of the ‘non-TelePresence’ tools.” He notes how crucial applications that are delivered via the cloud to mobile devices can be for today’s technology-heavy society.
In a Cisco blog post, Hilton Romanski, senior vice president and head of business development at Cisco, said he was excited to welcome Assemblage to Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group. He told that Assemblage brings a strong engineering team that would enable Cisco to accelerate its innovation in the field to “provide simple, easy-to-use solutions that help employees work smarter together from virtually anywhere.”
The acquisition will give the networking giant (Cisco) another collaboration tool in its box. As mentioned in a Penki.lt website post yesterday, Assemblage's relationship with third-party cloud providers gives Cisco an affordable, simple approach to get the most out of WebRTC capability. This will include that mass adoption of voice, video and file collaboration, which can be integrated into existing communication tools through the browser in any device, without the need for downloads, plugins, or installations.
Cisco advancing the state of interoperable Web video, with WebRTC, will enable the tech giant to move forward on delivering product solutions that they can call their own. Even more, they will join all other companies offering solutions in the WebRTC space, in hope to take over the hardware-based telepresence market.
Edited by Alisen Downey