Cisco has been on a software acquisition tear this year, and just added to the list with the purchase of Worklife, which offers technology for making meetings more productive. Worklife's capabilities will be rolled into Cisco's Spark collaboration platform. Here are the key details from Cisco's announcement:
Worklife’s mission is to help teams be prepared and informed so they can run highly effective meetings. Their application enables people to be more productive at work, by giving them more options to stay engaged before, during, and after meetings, from sharing agendas before the meeting, to taking notes during the meeting, and sharing those notes, as well as action items, after each meeting.
With the Worklife team onboard, we see an opportunity to build on the virtual meeting experience that the Cisco Spark platform currently provides, and enhance meeting productivity across the board. For example, we can start offering additional tools, tightly integrated into Cisco Spark, to help users track calendars, create agenda templates, and collaborate on note-taking in real-time during a meeting. Together, we can drive a better meeting experience for all of our users.
Cisco has used acquisitions to build out its collaboration strategy, with previous purchases including Collaborate.com, Acano and Tropo. While Cisco is positioning Worklife as an additive to Spark, it's already integrated with rival Slack as well. It's doubtful that Cisco would do anything to limit Worklife's integration with Slack or other tools, as it's shown a propensity for openness with Spark, evidenced by its two high-profile integration partnerships with Salesforce and IBM.
Cisco is driving toward a vision that is "about organizing our work around moments, and not necessarily chronological moments," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Alan Lepofsky. "We have to evolve and improve the way we organize people, content events around moments. No other part of your life revolves around an inbox, but off the top of your head you can tell me about when kids' soccer practices. Improving the way we do that at work is really important."
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