{"id":939,"date":"2016-10-17T16:53:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T16:53:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/cisco-strengthens-spark-meetings-management-with-worklife-acquisition.html"},"modified":"2016-10-17T16:53:39","modified_gmt":"2016-10-17T16:53:39","slug":"cisco-strengthens-spark-meetings-management-with-worklife-acquisition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/cisco-strengthens-spark-meetings-management-with-worklife-acquisition.html","title":{"rendered":"Cisco strengthens Spark meetings management with Worklife acquisition"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

Cisco announced today that it was acquiring Worklife<\/a>, a member of the\u00a0\u00a0Y Combinator winter 2015 class<\/a>,\u00a0for an undisclosed sum.<\/p>\n

Worklife was founded with the idea of improving online meetings, something that Cisco has been working on for years. It of course owns WebEx and has been trying\u00a0to enhance\u00a0that experience in recent years with Cisco Spark<\/a>. Cisco intends to add the Worklife team to the Spark team and try to bring their meeting wisdom to bear on the project.<\/p>\n

The idea behind Worklife is to keep the meeting on track by providing an agenda ahead of time that keeps people focused \u2014 or at least that\u2019s the stated goal. There is also\u00a0on-screen clock showing exactly how much time is left in the meeting (before you can back to real work) and you can create a record of the meeting and distribute it to participants afterward.<\/p>\n

Nothing earth-shattering here, but it\u2019s an attempt at least to \u00a0bring some digital order to meetings and it aligns with what Cisco has been trying to do with Spark. \u201cWith 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,\u201d Cisco senior vice president for corporate business development Rob Salvagno wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.<\/p>\n

Cisco is a company in transition as it watches its long-standing networking hardware business get undercut, but it has a substantial amount of cash on-hand to make whatever purchases it needs. It seems in the build-buy balance, this type of functionality could have been built, but when you have over $60 billion in the bank, you can just as easily go buy \u2014 and that\u2019s what Cisco has done here.<\/p>\n

Cisco plans to continue to offer the Worklife product as a stand-alone free service\u00a0for now, perhaps trying to use the freemium model to stoke interest and drive enterprise customers into the Spark\u00a0ecosystem.<\/p>\n

Cisco acquired Synata last March<\/a> to bring advanced search to Spark, so this is not the first time it has bought a small company to try and bring a distinct service to the platform.<\/p>\n

Worklife, which is based in San Francisco, was started in 2014 and had raised just over a million dollars, according to Crunchbase.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Hinterhaus Productions<\/a>\/Getty Images<\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/TgYgFBEHOgE\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cisco announced today that it was acquiring Worklife, a member of the\u00a0\u00a0Y Combinator winter 2015 class,\u00a0for an undisclosed sum. Worklife was founded with the idea of improving online meetings, something <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t