Cisco acquires Collaborate.com to show it’s hip to the BYOD trend

Cisco announced its acquisition of Collaborate.com today to capture the “market transition in mobility and cloud.” This is its ninth acquisition this year.  

“As the rapidly developing mobility and cloud markets transform the technology landscape, the population of mobile workers looking to extend the boundaries of their offices continues to grow,” Cisco senior vice president Hilton Romanski said today. “They want to connect, communicate and collaborate seamlessly, and their organizations are seeking user-friendly, mobile-centric collaboration tools that enable teams to work faster while being as productive as possible.”

Collaborate.com, true to its name, is a mobile collaboration platform for distributed workforces. It helps enterprise organizations adapt to the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) era by making it easier for people to access and share their business files from their phones.

Its project management apps for iPhone and Android are integrated with Box, Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. The apps keep all files in one place, and provide tools for task management and communication as well as push notifications to keep people on top of projects.

Collaborate was not built only in response to the BYOD trend but also to address the “consumerization of the enterprise,” meaning it aims to make its tools as user-friendly as possible.

Mobile devices are becoming increasingly pervasive in the enterprise world. However this evolution presents some big challenges for productivity, communication, security, and organization.

There is a spate of startups cropping up with various approaches to enterprise mobility —  Double Dutch, Taptera, CoTap, Enterproid, Apperian, and Tomfoolery, not to mention tech giants like Salesforce and SAP that also have BYOD solutions.

M&A is a core part of Cisco’s innovation strategy, and the acquisition of Collaborate.com will help to build out BYOD solutions. Collaborate’s team will join Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group.

Collaborate emerged out of Kibits, a company founded in 2011 that was backed by Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst, and others for its group messaging app. It then pivoted to Collaborate.com. Founder and CEO Matt Cutler was a founder of Netgenesis, which went public in 2011.

Collaborate is based in Boston. The financial details of the transaction were undisclosed.