Cisco this week said it intends to acquire London-based Acano Limited, a privately held company that provides collaboration infrastructure and conferencing software, for $700 million.
Acano’s hardware and software products include gateways, and video and audio bridges designed to allow customers to connect video systems from multiple vendors across both cloud and hybrid environments. Cisco says acquiring Acano will support its collaboration strategy of delivering video to multiple interoperable endpoints, screens and workspaces, at scale.
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Acano will help Cisco deliver video to tens of thousands of users from the cloud to any screen, including Microsoft platforms, through support of the WebRTC protocol.
"Collaboration has been on a tear in the last year, and six months," says Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group. "There's a drive towards video in every single conference room. And it needs to work with existing infrastructure, like Microsoft Lync. Acano has the best interoperability story in the market."
Acano's products can scale as well,Trollope says. Cisco and Acano are coexisting solutions in a multinational customer's 5,000 room rollout, he says.
Cisco says less than 10% of the conference rooms in the world are connected via video.
The Acano acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s fiscal 2016 third quarter, which ends in April, 2016. The company will join Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group led by Trollope.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay cash and assumed equity awards, plus additional retention based incentives for Acano employees who join Cisco.