Will Cisco’s Acano acquisition + Spark kill Ubiety?

If you aren't familiar, Ubiety is our global public cloud & hybrid implementation of Acano as a service.

We’ve been working very closely with the Acano team over the past three years, love their product and have grown Ubiety to be one of the most successful cloud implementations attracting many customers including NASA & The Guardian and over 100 resellers across the globe.

So when we heard the news that Cisco was to acquire Acano for $700Mil, it made us think long and hard about the future of our platform. Today Cisco also announced some interesting additions to the Cisco Spark platform including cloud provisioning, cloud endpoint registration, cloud telephony, seamlessly swapping devices mid-call (Acano style with a little more magic), API integration and hybrid services to existing Cisco UC environments.

Q: So will Acano & Spark combined kill the Ubiety service?

A: We hope not, the current form will change, but we actually see it as an opportunity

Q: Will it change our business model?

A: Absolutely

So the first question is what will Cisco do with the Acano technology? It's going to take a few months to close the deal, so it's business as usual for us and for Acano til then. Even after the acquisition is final it will probably take Cisco at least 12 months for them to build and integrate the Acano platform into Cisco’s ecosystem properly.

Why did Cisco purchase Acano? I believe for the team, the Skype4B integration, scalability, customizability and API openness.

Ultimately I would love to see the Cisco Spark User Interface as the Unified Comms experience powered by the Acano based backend with simple options of 100% cloud, 100% on-prem, or hybrid. WebEx, Expressway and Call Manager could go away. Telepresence servers and CMR will most definitely go away.

Also adding Skype4b connectivity and gateway calling to Spark will be an incredibly important feature to save Cisco from losing the web conferencing customers they currently have to Microsoft. So as a user I will be able seamlessly integrate video endpoints, web guest and phone dial in connectivity to “Skype Meetings” or easily create, join and communicate to/from project based “Spark Rooms” in my Skype4B interface. Delivering the best of both worlds and mean they can live seamlessly together in the same enterprise.

So like Rowan’s strategy of simplifying the Cisco endpoint portfolio, I think the same could (and should) be true for the web conferencing, video bridging and infrastructure side. Simplified into one product as Spark, then its up to the customer how they consume it across cloud/hybrid/on-prem. Purchased by user, not multiple software licenses. People, not ports.

So what does this all mean for us? and the Ubiety service that customers already love?

Today

As mentioned, immediately it's business as usual and in fact we are announcing new pricing launching this week to purchase cloud Acano from just $25 per month > sub $10 per month based on volume. We believe rich interoperable video-web-phone collaboration should be available for everyone, not just the executive team and the elite few.

In addition the short-term gaps we currently see in Spark that we can fill with Ubiety are obviously the interoperability with Skype4b, but also our free global dial in telephony for no extra licensing or per minute costs at all.

Another important factor is scale, today we have customers doing calls with hundreds of participants and Spark meetings is launching with a maximum of just 25 participants (larger meetings requiring WebEx).

Granular level controls of virtual meeting rooms, different access methods for different type of meetings, all very important, especially for larger calls.

Other opportunities we see massive demand for include cloud endpoint registrations for Polycom, Lifesize and non-Spark Cisco endpoints. And an area I’m really interested in is software based video conference endpoints bringing collaboration literally to every meeting room using a standard PC|Mac connected to USB peripherals from Logitech (and others).

For us the addition of the Cisco relationship we hope will also open the door to many more customers that may not have been aware of the Ubiety service before that have an immediate need for Skype4B interop and can utilize Ubiety public cloud/hybrid cloud til we know exactly how Cisco plan to integrate the Acano interop capability in the future and keep some of those other pesky cloud competitors at bay ;)

The future

We are very excited about the future Acano technology in the Cisco environment. For us a cloud and hybrid specialist it will be an interesting time. Whether we continue to host the cloud service ourselves or Cisco hosts the cloud service I don’t feel is important. What I do believe is important is that we get to control the edges, with control over inbound/outbound telephony and API developer integration which Cisco announced and committed to in today’s Spark announcement.

If you look at the service providers out there today that sell WebEx as an example, there are many, WebEx itself is the same across the board, so what’s makes the service provider's unique? It’s the telephony access, the integrations, the pricing, packaging and how they support, train and the relationship with customers.

We believe the similar will happen with Spark and we are uniquely positioned to deliver these fringe pieces with excellence at almost unbeatable prices (compared to legacy conference call providers) and still share great margin to our own partner channel. Plus plan to develop many more bespoke app integrations than anyone else.

Ultimately the future is unknown, but it's an exciting opportunity to be part of and look forward to continuing our great partnership with the Acano team and our building new relationships with the Cisco collaboration group!

Please let me know your thoughts and comments here too.

Daryl

p.s. contact us for year end annual Ubiety plan deals