Collaboration technology gives us the ability to work together anywhere, on any device, at any time. With more and more people using smartphones and tablets to do their work, it is more important than ever that enterprise collaboration delivers high quality voice, video, chat and online sharing instantly, to any device on any platform.
Today, I am pleased to announce Cisco’s acquisition of Assemblage to help us capture the ongoing market transitions of mobility, cloud and the Internet of Everything (IoE). Assemblage has built a talented team of web developers to deliver the tools and the infrastructure to enable simple, real-time collaboration through the browser to any device, without the need for downloads, plugins, or installations.
Assemblage offers real-time collaboration apps for shared whiteboarding, presentation broadcasting and screensharing. Users are able to collaborate simply via their browser with one-click, instantly accessing collaboration apps delivered via the cloud. Assemblage’s technology also integrates with popular third party cloud services and supports 40 different file types to enable quick and efficient collaboration.
With this acquisition, Assemblage brings a strong team of engineers with deep web development expertise to Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group (CTG), enabling Cisco to accelerate innovation and develop simple, easy to use, next generation collaboration solutions. In addition, Assemblage’s experience integrating with third party cloud ecosystem applications like Box and Google shows a close alignment to Cisco’s collaboration strategy and our commitment to simplicity and interoperability.
We are excited to welcome Assemblage to our collaboration team. Together, Cisco and Assemblage will provide simple, easy-to-use solutions that help employees work smarter together from virtually anywhere.
At the onset this looks like a very strategic purchase, so how does this play into our other recent purchase of Collaborate.com and how does this also play longer term with our WebEx platform? Guess we’ll all hear in due time. 😉
Hi Jose, thanks for your comment. Much like Collaborate.com, Assemblage also has unique collaboration technology and a strong team of engineers with deep web development expertise. Both teams will help Cisco’s Cloud Collaboration Technology Group (CCTG) accelerate Cisco’s innovation in collaboration. The combination of Assemblage and Cisco’s existing collaboration and communication platforms will provide customers with simple solutions that deliver advanced collaboration and communication experiences, helping employees to work more effectively from anywhere.
Kollaborate.io, Presentation.io and Same.io are great assets and with this acquisition adds to Cisco’s “tool box.” Cisco has used acquisitions to close gaps in its technologies, allowing it to assemble a broad range of products and to grow very quickly from a company with a single product line into the global IT leader.
With relevant acquisitions, Cisco has become the most strategic business partner of customers. This acquisition will definitely add value for Cisco, it’s customers, employees and shareholders.
Well done!
I am curious on how Webex will integrate or complement Assemblage products.
Hi Ron, thanks for your question. WebEx provides web conferencing capabilities that bring voice, video, and content sharing together to allow mobile workers to have more productive meetings wherever they are. Assemblage enables simple, one-click, real-time visual collaboration and online sharing without the hassle of downloads, plugins or installations. Assemblage’s technology will be integrated into Cisco’s next-generation collaboration platform so that our own offerings will have the same simple ability to share easily.
Congratulations and welcome Assemblage team, let’s wait and see. 🙂
Excellent acquisition! This creates a wonderful collaboration tool for increasing efficiency.
There one critical aspect that gets commonly overlooked and causes organizations a lot of time and money. It is the individual’s and management’s awareness of existing expertise, processes, projects and components.
In my position as a product developer, I have experienced numerous cases in which developers had no idea that a colleague was doing something similar or that certain components are already wildly used in other products of the organization. Or, that there are even pre-qualified resources that can be utilized during the development of hardware or software development. If awareness of all these facts would exist within an enterprise, product development could be much faster and way more cost efficient.
Hence, in short, the idea was born to connect people on the same or similar content within an enterprise. This strategy will allow users to find information about the same or similar elements and the individuals/logistics related to the content. There is an algorithm that will link users in realtime to connect on pre-specified content. This way, members of an enterprise can find each other and discuss a selected content right away and streamline their workflow.
I have worked with my co-inventors for several years to achieve several granted patens on this subject. If possible, we would be delighted to provide more detailed information.
http://www.addnclick.net
Best regards,
Peter
————-
Peter H. Muller
Interform Product Development and Design
650.529.1999
Skype: inter4m
inter4m@comcast.net
http://www.inter4m.com
I congratulate you and wish you continued success.
Congratulations.Hopefully this will be successful.
Hi Hilton and Team
At a more fundamental level, Box.com adoption inside Cisco is expected to provide screen sharing and multiple attendees editing a document (say meeting minutes) over WebEx. Assemblage seems to be in this space as well – Is it fair to say, Assemblage will have significant overlap of functionalities with Box.com?
Secondly, does Assemblage come with in-built (strong) security infrastructure to ensure Collaboration is secure for internal Cisco users and Cisco customers? Something that could be a very good ‘complementary’ effect for Box.com, given both are going to co-exist in the Cisco environment.
Thank you in advance for your response.
Cheers
Ram Chandrasekaran
Hi Ram, thanks for your questions. Assemblage offers real-time collaboration apps for shared whiteboarding, presentation broadcasting and screensharing. Assemblage’s technology integrates with popular third party cloud services, like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, and supports 40 different file types to enable quick and efficient collaboration.
Collaboration is one of Cisco’s top five priorities. Cisco’s strategic focus in collaboration is on delivering integrated experiences for the end user across mobile, desktop, and Cisco endpoints and providing the manageability, security, and compliance requirements for the IT staff responsible for delivery.
Mr. Romanski, I don’t see it on the blog here, but was very excited to read about the launch of Cisco Canada’s $150M fund for startups. We have launched a private sector program for startups here at Aird & Berlis LLP in Toronto offering our Canadian legal services to startup’s for flat fees, hosting demo days for the community to connect companies and investors and will soon be profiling companies on our blog http://www.startupsource.ca/. We would welcome the chance to meet and brainstorm with others in the private sector who are active and passionate in helping startups succeed!
Good Day Hilton,
Congratulations on the Assemblage acquisition. It is indeed interesting to follow Webex as you embrace the disruptive potential of WebRTC in the collaborative space. I am associated with Consychro.com who is currently developing advanced collaboration features on a WebRTC backbone. We have a particular focus on building a more robust and flexible communication experience for end-users. We have a strong belief that we are emerging into the market with a significant edge. We would be every happy to engage with Cisco to explore any potential areas of collaboration.
My apologies for typo. error in my previous comment. The correct website is http://www.consynchro.com
How will this compare in features to teamviewer as in simplicity of use and speed over low bandwidth links ?
Will it be small compact and fast or go the webex route where low band width becomes an issue?
Hi Ralph, thanks for your question. The Assemblage technology will be integrated into next generation and current Cisco collaboration products. We will continue to drive simplicity and ease of use. Variable and low bandwidth is always a concern for collaboration solutions. You will see us continuing to innovate in this area. At this point we can’t share any information on the size of the meeting client.
Hello , thanks for this great share , I hope cisco will develop the assemblage project further , it’s really a nice & good approach to futur , but I think it’s difficult to accomplish and use it effectively especially in third world countries where internet speed and operator are not of a good quality , for example here in morocco we have 3 internet provider but all the three sucks no quality even if you hear 20 mbit internet it’s not constant which lead to congestion and packets loss
Sounds like a good news~