Today Cisco announced that it acquired little known collaboration startup Versly for an undisclosed amount. Versly sells collaboration tools for Microsoft Office products, including Word, Excel and Outlook. In an interview today, Murali Sitaram, VP/GM of the Cisco Collaboration Software Group, told me that while existing Versly service will still be available to its current 200-300 beta users, Cisco’s intent is to integrate Versly into its existing products, not to offer a standalone product. He says, however, that a standalone product may be offered in the future.

According to the anouncement, “Versly’s software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco’s collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx.” One feature already mentioned is an activity stream of document updates from Versly to Quad, Cisco’s enterprise social networking product: “Users will be able to receive automatic notifications within Cisco Quad when the content of a document has changed, escalate from simply reviewing a document to an instant messaging session through Cisco Jabber, or initiate a web conferencing session from a presentation through Cisco WebEx.”

Versly was founded by a team that draws experience from original Java team at Sun, WebLogic, Apache, and Zimbra. According to the company website, it was funded by: “Accel Partners, Baseline Ventures, and 500 Startups along with angel investors Scott Dietzen, Kenny Van Sant, Jonathan Katzman, and Rasool Rayani.”

Services Angle

This acquisition means two things:

• Shows that Cisco is still in the collaboration game, at least for now.
• Cisco sees the importance of context in collaboration.

Commitment to Collaboration

Not long after Cisco decided to shutter the Flip camera line, which it had just acquired in 2009 for $590 million in stock, it also shuttered Eos, a social video platform. After CEO John Chambers’s memo about the company re-focusing I started hearing questions about whether Cisco would sell WebEx, and/or shutter Quad.

Although Cisco executives have publicly claimed that the company was still committed to collaboration, this acquisition shows that commitment in ways that words cannot. Corporations can be fickle beasts, as HP’s dumping of its WebOS and PC business shows, so it’s still entirely possible that Cisco will get out of the collaboration business. But this shows that it is still all-in for now. “We’re actually doubling down on collaboration,” Sitaram said.

Contextual Collaboration

As I wrote last week as Quad competitor Yammer rolled out new integration features, context and integration are the way forward for social collaboration tools. Social collaboration tools will be at their most useful when they are tightly integrated with “real” business software – whatever employees use to get their work, whether those are ERP systems or office suites. Qontext has known this for a long time, and products like Socialcast (now owned by VMware) and TIBCO tibbr are emphasizing this as well. As Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group points out on Twitter, Quad is in need of the sort of contextual integration that Versly can provide.

Sitaram confirmed that this a major part of the Versly acquisition. “We need to offer collaboration where our customers are already doing their work,” he said. Quad already offers integrations with SharePoint and Documentum, and non-Cisco IM tools such as Microsoft Office Communicator. The Versly integration will allow Quad to act a middle-layer between these other applications. Sitaram also emphasized the fact that Versly will be a part of other tools, such as WebEx.

I’m fond of this blog entry by Patel, in which he explains how social features can enhance traditional business tools:

Ever since the wide scale adoption of ERP applications, largely thanks to the Y2K hoax, we’ve been judiciously streamlining process in black and white. Ensuring that every application has a Submit and a Cancel Button. Commit your decision now, or roll back. Choose now and forever hold your peace.
Decisions are not always black and white in the Enterprise context. To me, the ultimate promise of social computing lies in improved process execution outcomes. What I’ve been looking for is an in-context and even onscreen utility inside enterprise process apps that helps you answer: “I’m not sure” OR “What’s the best selection from that dropdown menu” OR “Who knows more about this than I?” OR “Can I first take a vote from a few smarty pants before I commit, please?

This is why these sorts of integration are so important, and why the future of integrations will be driven by social applications for the time being.