Cisco Announces Acano Acquisition

Cisco is after another acquisition, with its announced intent to acquire Acano Limited. With the completion of the acquisition, Cisco will be able to accelerate its strategy to deliver video across endpoints, workplaces, and users worldwide.

Acano Limited is a UK-based provider of conferencing software and collaboration infrastructure, founded in 2012 by former Cisco executives. It offers audio, video, and web conferencing, as well as video and audio bridging technology that connects video systems from multiple vendors through cloud and hybrid environments. With the acquisition of Acano, Cisco aims to speed up development for both interoperability and scalability.

Regarding interoperability, Acano has worked to develop products connecting endpoints and systems from a range of collaboration vendors. Cisco will be able to better deliver video from the cloud to nearly any endpoint, including mobile browsers via WebRTC, and offers enhanced support for Microsoft’s proprietary protocols.

For scalability, Acano offers hardware appliances and virtualized software options that can connect tens of thousands of users. It is growing more and more important that infrastructure models can support an ever-increasing number of users, so adding Acano’s scalability to Cisco’s offerings will greatly help Cisco in getting video collaboration to users everywhere.

“The Cisco acquisition of Acano appears to be a reflection of the latest changes in Enterprise video,” states Phil Edholm, UC Expert for UCStrategies. “The focus in video is moving from a closed single vendor system supporting internal meetings and a room focus to the inclusion of participants that are external to the company and on a wide range of devices and business communications platforms. The Acano technology and products are focused to delivering an integrated video solution that can be premise or cloud deployed and enables the multi-vendor and participants video events. It is a logical evolution of the Cisco video offers in the changing world.”

The acquisition will cost Cisco $700 million in cash and assumed equity awards, in addition to retention-based incentives for Acano employees who join Cisco. Following the acquisition, the Acano team will become a part of the Cisco Collaboration Technology group, led by senior vice president and general manager Rowan Trollope. It is expected to close in the third quarter of 2016.

For more information, visit www.cisco.com and www.acano.com.

2 Responses to "Cisco Announces Acano Acquisition" - Add Yours

Tim Banting 11/25/2015 10:16:29 AM

While I agree with Phil's take on the direction video is taking, I feel Acano is more about collaborative team-spaces and persistent virtual meeting rooms.

Voice and video are real-time tools reminiscent of an era when people worked in a central office, in one country, with distinct organizational hierarchies, and job functions. Now we work across very complex international supply chains, have contingency workers within virtual teams, and fight fires on a weekly basis. Email doesn't cut it, nor does setting up conference calls across continents.

New SoCoMo (Social, Collaborative, and Mobile) apps are a modern day approach to solving a business problem. This was not just another "video acquisition" from Cisco. Acano provides bridging and integration capabilities at great scale, plus the potential to roll persistent CoSpaces into Cisco Spark.

I look forward to hearing all about Cisco's roadmap and plans, once Acano is acquired. I'm not sure this is just an evolution of Cisco Video- the potential is more profound than that.

Blair Pleasant 11/25/2015 2:32:00 PM

Tim: Good point. Acano has a lot more to offer than just video - it'll be interesting to see how Cisco folds it in. I assume we'll hear all about it at Collab Summit coming up.