Founded in 2011, Collaborate.com (formerly a service of Boston-based Kibits Corp.) is a unified document sharing, task management and team communication environment for the mobile workforce. It has native support for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and the Web, and offers out-of-the-box integration with popular cloud services such as Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive and Apple iCloud.
Today, December 17, 2013, Cisco announced that it has acquired the service. In a blog post, Cisco said that the acquisition will help it better navigate mobile collaboration and cloud computing. Collaborate.com can meld with email and third party cloud services for so called "enterprise workstreams."
Cisco also believes that the acquisition will allow it to build better mobile collaboration tools. Although no terms of the deal have been disclosed as of yet, we do know that Collaborate.com engineers will fold into Cisco's collaboration technology group. This group handles everything from Webex to video conferencing tools.
It would indeed appear that Cisco is trying to strengthen and re-enforce its collaboration unit. The unit has struggled to grow, as the telepresence market has been under fire due to lower cost alternatives. In its fiscal first quarter, collaboration revenue was up just 1 percent from a year ago, at $1.03 billion.
In a Forbes interview back in July of this year, Matt Cutter, who built Collaborate.com, said, “The market for collaboration software is $40 billion but only 50 percent of the buyers are satisfied. Collaboration software is supposed to help boost team productivity and efficiency. But for most team members, it’s overhead – they manage their lives on their mobile devices and then spend two hours doing what their collaboration software requires.”
Right now, Cisco has the most market share in the telepresence and Web conferencing market and has recently refreshed its video phone, telepresence and WebEx servers.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee 
QUICK LINKS 
