Just a few weeks after Twillio assumed “unicorn” status with a “stealthy” sale of $100 million worth of stock (achieving a $1+ billion valuation, telco platform rival Tropo has made major news of its own. Today, in a blog post by Hilton Romanski, Cisco’s head of corporate business development, the dominant, global provider of IP communications infrastructure announced its intent to complete the acquisition of the communications platform and API provider before year’s end.

[As an aside, it is interesting to note that, in April 1999, Cisco made its bold foray into IP-telephony and voice call management with the purchase of GeoTel.]

The acquisition is a wise move by Cisco. It lends great curb appeal to the company’s cloud-based offerings for applications developers (both independent and Telco-based). Tropo  has its origins as Voxeo Labs, which was chartered by Voxeo founder Jonathan Taylor in 2009 to “incubate revolutionary ideas and innovate new communications solutions.” At the time, I referred to it as “Telco in Legoland.” Cisco will be the beneficiary of tireless efforts by its president Jason Goecke, CTO Jose de Castro and their cohort over the past 6 years to integrate telephony development tools, APIs and “open source” principles into the telephony cloud.

Cisco has been making great strides of its own to fulfill on a vision of cloud-based and hybrid (“interCloud) collaboration. At Enterprise Connect in March 2015, Cisco showed how its latest architecture for team collaboration has largely overcome barriers to establishing immediate, impromptu connectivity across multiple devices, locations, enterprise firewalls and modalities. Over the years, Cisco ingested cloud-based teleconferencing specialists WebEx, videoconference endpoint provider Tanberg, and cross-platform instant messaging protocol provider Jabber. At the same time it originated its own formidable technologies for high-definition video Telepresence and most recently the uber-agile messaging/collab/team conferencing cloud, Spark (originally Project Squared).

It’s one thing to acquire a company; it is an entirely different matter to integrate the acquisitions into a working framework for communications and collaboration in “near real time.” Under Trollope and his team, Cisco has proven that it can accomplish that goal. His team will find several features in Tropo that further its efforts to simplify the efforts to add telephony-features to mobile and even social apps (like Facebook or Twitter). It started in 2012 with the introduction of Ameche and culminated with the formal introduction of the InCall App feature in February 2015.

The Tropo platform and the 250,000+ developers bring great value to Cisco’s cloud-based  Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). This is an acquisition in which I can guarantee that the sum will be greater than its parts, especially as the “hybrid cloud” or “intercloud” architectures take shape.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles

Tags: Cisco, IP telephony, Collaboration, Tropo, Mergers and Acquisitions