Cisco Systems is buying Heroik Labs, Inc., the company behind Worklife a meeting productivity application. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The purchase strengthens Cisco’s collaboration offerings, which includes its Spark platform.
“We are excited to welcome a team with a vision that is so complementary to Cisco’s own collaboration strategy, namely, to provide the best collaboration experience across every touch point, every space, and for every employee.” Rob Salvagno, Cisco’s vice-president of corporate business development, said in in a blog. “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.”
To build up its portfolio Cisco has also bought Collaborate.com, Assemblage, Tropo, Acano and Synata.
The Worklife team will report into Cisco cloud collaboration technology business unit under senior vice-president and general manager Jens Meggers. The current plan is that Worklife’s existing online meeting software will continue to be offered free to customers, Cisco said, including premium features (custom templates, viewing team tasks, company branding, etc.)
“Our vision with Worklife was to make it dead simple for teams to adopt “meeting best practices” in order to collaborate more effectively with their colleagues,” founder and CEO Dave Kashen said in a blog. “We wanted to enable teams to get more done in less time. We wanted people to enjoy working together. We wanted people to love their work life.”
“In joining Cisco, we will be able to bring many more resources to bear toward our shared vision of helping teams work better together. Going forward, we will integrate tightly into Cisco’s collaboration suite so that you can have one integrated solution for highly effective meetings – before, during and after your meetings.”