UPDATED 11:25 EDT / OCTOBER 17 2016

NEWS

Cisco acquires Worklife to boost Spark team collaboration service

Cisco Systems Inc. is aggressively scaling its collaboration business in  response to the widening enterprise adoption of tools like Slack. Today, the networking giant acquired a startup called Heroik Labs Inc. for its popular Worklife service, which is described as a sort of Swiss Army Knife for managing office meetings.

The application promises to help streamline the organization of a team briefing or brainstorming session, starting from the initial preparation stage. Worklife provides an agenda management feature that allows the person who schedules a meeting to create an organized list of the topics to cover. Then once the discussion is underway, the group can consult their pre-prepared items to ensure that the conversation is on track. Users are also able to cross out bullet points as they’re addressed by the team to show the progress of the conversation.

At the same time, Worklife enables the other meeting participants to write down their impressions from the presentation in a shared note-taking panel displayed below the agenda items. The feature can be used to record everything from who was assigned which task to how well a particular briefing went. It’s also possible to share notes with colleagues who didn’t attend but are still affected indirectly.

Worklife’s feature set has attracted thousands of enterprise customers since its launch in 2014, including Toyota Motor Corp., Zendesk Inc. and other major brands. Cisco will absorb all of those customer accounts through today’s acquisition along with the Heroik Labs team, which is set to join its Cloud Collaboration Technology Business Unit. The startup’s application will be integrated with the company’s Spark team communications platform.

The Heroik purchase, for which a price was not disclosed, is the latest in a series of collaboration acquisitions that Cisco has announced over the past few quarters. The company previously picked up a startup called Synata Inc. to let Spark users navigate shared document repositories more easily, and completed its $700 million purchase of teleconferencing specialist Acano Ltd. in June.

Image courtesy of Cisco

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