Cisco To Buy California based Tropo; Acquisition To Help Cisco offer ‘Collaboration Platform-As-A-Service’

Cisco revealed its plans to acquire the six year old California based firm Tropo on May 7. Tropo provides cloud application programming interface (API) platform and as per Cisco this acquisition will enable the company to offer ‘collaboration platform-as-a-service’, as per reports.

According to a report on ZDNet, this collaboration platform will enable Cisco customers to create communications services without many developments. Tropo has more than 200,000 developers and its platform can provide voice calls and texts. With this acquisition, Cisco will now compete with Twilio, reports ZDNet.

Tropo gives its product free of cost to the developers and then it charges from each communication made through the Tropo platform, reports Tech Crunch. It is yet to be confirmed, if Cisco will continue with the same pricing model, mentions the Tech Crunch report.

"Tropo's robust APIs and its 200K+-strong developer network gives Cisco the ability to extend the power of its collaboration technologies to third-party applications and end-points," a Tech Times report quoted Cisco's Hilton Romanski, as saying. Tropo’s technological superiority will help developers to create apps that can be integrated seamlessly into the service provider’s existing communication infrastructure and this will help the service provider to find methods to generate new income sources, reports Tech Times.

As per the Tech Times report, the details of the deal have not been revealed and Tropo’s employees are likely to join Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group that is headed by Cisco’s SVP and GM, Rowan Trollope. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of FY 2015, reports Tech Times. The Tech Crunch report mentions, the acquisition of Tropo will provide Cisco a platform to lure developers to its wider ecosystem, which is important for a company like Cisco, trying to avoid disruption.

According to a report on the eWeek, Cisco introduced Project Squared in November 2014 that includes a wide range of collaboration technologies like WebEx and the initiative was renamed ‘Spark’ in March. Companies like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, ShoreTel and Avaya are building their portfolios to make cloud and software based collaboration technologies available for their customers, as per the eWeek report.

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