Cisco Enhances Collaboration Service Spark with Synata Acquisition

Companies in the US can now message, meet and call using Cisco Spark, Cisco’s cloud-based collaboration service that offers a per user per month subscription model, according to an announcement by Cisco this week.

The company first announced Cisco Spark in December, rolling out its Cisco Spark for Developers offering and select services of Cisco Spark.

While the complete Cisco Spark service is available in the US immediately, meeting and message components are available in 30 other countries as well. 

Also this week, Cisco acquired  Synata to enhance how customers can search rooms and content in Cisco Spark. The San Francisco-based company’s technology allows users to search both on-premise and cloud-based applications simultaneously from one platform, according to Rob Salvagno, head of Cisco’s M&A and venture investment team.

ClouDRaaS provides recovery points objectives (RPOs) of seconds and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of minutes, according to Backup Technology. 

Verizon and Dimension Data are among the first partners Cisco has tapped to create services based on Cisco Spark. With Verizon, for example, Cisco Spark is now available to Verizon’s customers as part of its plan to offer a range of collaboration solutions.

One of the interesting features in Cisco Spark is bots, or software that can fetch information. An example used by Cisco is if an employee wants to update a photo in a company directory but doesn’t know who to ask, they can now ask a bot. Cisco is planning more uses for bots so stay tuned.  

“Imagine that a plant manager is in an airport on the way to a conference when his production line goes down.  In manufacturing, time is money—the onsite team needs to be able to quickly and securely reach out to him, get him reports and photos and escalate to a video call to show the problem and agree upon the fix,” Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration, Data Analytics and IoT groups said in a statement. “This is the kind of collaboration Cisco Spark makes possible. Simple to use and custom-built for developers with enterprise security and manageability, we truly believe it will change everything.”

In partnership with Cisco Investments, the company has created a fund to invest $150 million in the Cisco Spark ecosystem, covering direct investments, joint development, additional enhancements and developer support, Cisco said.