Cisco Wants to Make Meetings More Productive with Worklife Acquisition

Cisco (CSCO) has acquired Heroik Labs, which does business as Worklife, to boost its collaboration capabilities which continue to be a top priority for the company. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Worklife is based in San Francisco and its application helps improve meeting productivity, Cisco’s VP of corporate business development Rob Salvagno said in a blog post on Monday.

“With the Worklife team onboard, we see an opportunity to build on the virtual meeting experience that the Cisco Spark platform currently provides, and enhance meeting productivity across the board,” he writes in a blog post. “For example, we can start offering additional tools, tightly integrated into Cisco Spark, to help users track calendars, create agenda templates, and collaborate on note-taking in real-time during a meeting. Together, we can drive a better meeting experience for all of our users.”

According to recent research by Synergy, Cisco is the market leader in the collaboration segment, with over 16 percent share, followed by Microsoft (13 percent) and Avaya (four percent).

The Worklife team will report into the Cloud Collaboration Technology Business Unit under SVP and GM Jens Meggers.

In a separate blog post on Monday, Meggers reflected on the past few months in Cisco Spark, which the company launched in December to combine messaging, meeting, and calling into one streamlined user experience.

“Worklife expands beyond the now – the in-meeting experience – to pre- and post-meeting capabilities like agendas, templates, notes, co-editing, tasks, and meeting previews. It’s about helping users stay engaged before, during, and after meetings. I’m excited to integrate these tools into Spark.”

Worklife’s existing online meeting software will continue to be offered free to customers, Cisco said.

The acquisition of Worklife comes less than four months after Cisco acquired cloud access security broker CloudLock for $293 million in June.

Cloud services are one area where Cisco expects to grow after it announced in August that it would cut about 7 percent of its workforce.