Cisco System Acquires Tropo

Cisco Systems have expressed intentions to acquire Tropo in the upcoming times.

Cisco Systems has announced in their latest Cisco news today that it wishes to acquire Tropo, which is an API platform firm. Tropo is a privately held company that offers services in providing cloud API platform. It is currently eyeing to establish a collaboration platform as a service commonly referred as CPaaS. Hence, the acquisition of Tropo will allow the networking giant, Cisco, to provide the CPaaS platform to customers and developers in order to “create and sell new communications services with minimal development effort”.

The company said, “Tropo’s APIs and its 200,000 developer network give the ‘networking giant’ the ability to extend the power of its collaboration technologies to third-party applications and end-points.” The company aims to benefit a lot from the ‘acquired’ technology, as it will enable its customers and developers to build certain applications that will be deeply integrated in the existing communication infrastructure of the service provider. Furthermore, it will also assist in providing an upper hand over other OTT competitors in the market. The CPaaS platform will also create a new stream of revenues for Cisco.

It is believed that the special platform of Tropo can provide clients with SMSs and voice calls. Upon the completion of this acquisition, the team of API platform firm will be joining Cisco System’s Collaboration Technology Group (CTG) segment, which will be overlooked by the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the company, Rowan Trollope. The company added, “We look forward to bringing Tropo’s unique communications platform as a service as a key component into Cisco’s cloud collaboration platform. Together, we will help extend the Cisco platform to third party endpoints and applications via modern APIs and enable Cisco to better serve the developer community.”

It will take a lot of time for the deal to be signed between both parties. According to Tech Crunch, regarding updated Cisco news, the ‘transaction’ is expected to complete in the fourth quarter of the 2015 fiscal year.

Tropo was an independent team, which will be incorporated into a large firm after the acquisition. Hence, this might be a little bit of problem for the company, as it would need to value everyone from there without ‘alienating them’. This is a very common challenge that other companies, same as Cisco, face while acquiring developer tools as Tropo.

For instance, when IBM purchased Alchemy API, it went through the same challenges, as the developer tool was a large loyal community, which was purchased by one of the largest tech giant.